To Welcome You Home
by Omnicat
Summary: He had turned his back on the First Order, thrown himself at his mother's feet, set his hands toward rebuilding and redeeming. But his heart was slower to follow. How do you banish the darkness when every beam of light shone into it only shows more clearly how thoroughly it has ruined you? / angsty, Ben-centric, slow-burn redemption/recovery w Leia, Rey, dead fathers & mentors, etc
1. I - The End

**Title:** To Welcome You Home

**Author:** Omnicat

**Canon Notes/Spoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge:** J.J. Abrams & co's _Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens_ and Rian Johnson & co's _Star __Wars: Episode VIII: The Last Jedi_ are a must; George Lucas & co's _Star Wars: Episode I_ through _VI_, Ron Howard & co's _Solo: A Star Wars Story_ and Gareth Edwards & co's _Rogue One: A Star Wars Story_ are strongly recommended; J.J. Abrams & co's _Star Wars: Episode IX __– The Rise of Skywalker_ and all Extended Universe materials compliant with it are ignored. This fic is spiritually compliant with Charles Soule & Will Sniley's _The Rise of Kylo Ren_, though I started writing and planning too early to make it factually compliant. I use freely from any Extended Universe materials I'm familiar with, but I'm doing my best to ensure everything makes sense if you've only seen the movies. (The EU is a _monster_. Help.) The timeline I've set Ben's backstory to is of my own making, however, and at this point I honestly don't have the heart to adjust it to the canon one. There needs to be _some_ limit to all this angst.

**Content Notes/Warnings: **Heavy angst with slow-burn recovery. Canon-typical violence, fallout from canonical character deaths, rather more explicitly creepy and abusive than movie canon Snoke, self-hatred/blame/harm/destructive behavior, suicidal thoughts, misc other heavy psychological stuff/trauma/(ex-)villainy, and a POV character who is very much a source and subject of hatred and conflict. Modern Earth profanity, because I can't take 'kriff' seriously. (It sounds like a brand of dog food! Or krill's cranky cousin! Seriously, I can't do it.)

There is no sexual element to Snoke and Kylo/Ben's relationship at any point in this fic, present or past tense, explicitly or implicitly. That being said, my primary goal with Snoke was for him and his relationship to Ben to make your skin crawl. I didn't skimp on the predatory, faux-fatherly, 'benevolent deity'-esque kinds of affection and intimacy, and Snoke enters Ben's life when he's _very_ young. On top of all the physical, mental, emotional, and magical abuse that's there intentionally, if (child) sexual abuse is something you avoid in stories, please be advised that this might trip some wires despite the lack of a formal rape warning.

**Characters & Relationships:** Ben & Leia, Rey(lo), Poe, Finn (x), Rose, Force Ghost Luke, in absentia: Snoke and Han, and various bit parts and cameos both canonical and original

**Summary:** He had turned his back on the First Order and thrown himself at his mother's feet. He had set his hands toward rebuilding and redeeming. But his heart was slower to follow. How do you banish the darkness when every beam of light shone into it only shows more clearly how thoroughly it has ruined you?

or: angsty, Ben-centric, slow-burn redemption-equals-recovery and recovery-equals-redemption fic, featuring equal parts mommy feels, Reylo, all the different ways his dead father figures and mentors haunt him, and a lot of friction between the ideals of reconciliation and rehabilitation, and the reality of the great, fresh, bloody wounds struck between them all

**Author's Note:** All comments, from long to short and from a single emoji to an essay, make my day! If you have any questions about the fic, feel free to ask, and if you spot any SPAG problems, I would be grateful if you pointed them out. (Please be as specific as possible so I know where and what to look for!)

Enjoy!

**II-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-I-oOo-I-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-II**

**_I – The End_**

His mother was alive. In the end, it was that simple.

He'd thought he had seen her die. He had watched as the command bridge of her ship was engulfed in flames, had felt her presence in the Force fade into nothingness, had received Snoke's damning praise for finally being an orphan, holding still for it with bent knee and raised chin like something frigid and slimy and toxic was being poured down his throat. He had tried to be glad, or triumphant, something, _anything_, but only felt whatever warmth remained in the universe, in himself, leach away. The process started with his murder of his father now completed, everything inside and out cold and dead and hollow.

Everything but that secret pinprick of connection the Force had given him to Rey. Rey, hurtling herself toward him through the dark like a comet, burning hot and bright as she entered his atmosphere as if to single-handedly keep the life and light in him from dying completely. Rey, who slashed him open all over again and abandoned him as quickly as she'd come, like everything that happened between them had been nothing but the last, dying pulse of a star. A flare of light with no other purpose than ripping the already fraying fabric of his reality apart, exposing the void underneath. A brightly burning after-image of nothing.

No mother, no father. No master, no equal. No Jedi or Sith or Empire or Rebellion. No passion, nor peace. (No phantom fingers combing through his hair, dragging along his scalp, sinking like the finest claws into the whorls of his brain and trailing off down his spine until his entire body was lit up with treacherous alarm.) Just empty silence inside, and all around him the gaping maw, the bottomless pit, the black hole that was the First Order.

But then – the report. The footage. Shaky blue-light movement and sound warbled with static. But _his mother_. Alive. And she hadn't been angry before he stopped sensing her, had reached for him just as he had reached for her – but then the shot had come from behind him and he was too shocked to stop it and she was gone, he'd thought in his weakness he had killed her too, but he hadn't. _He hadn't._

All around the table had been high-ranked predators in neatly-pressed uniforms, waiting for him to tell them how to correct the oversight of Leia Organa's survival, when something had just _snapped_. And suddenly everything was simple. For the first time in sixteen years, he only knew, not what he thought he could or felt he must, but what he _wanted_ to do.

His answer was no. No matter the question. _No._

So he turned on his heel and ran. He hurled himself back into his mother's arms like he had wanted but felt too hurt and rejected and inadequate and monstrous to do since he was fourteen years old and she pushed him down the ramp of her ship towards an uncle he barely knew and didn't _want_ to know, not if it meant formally separating from his parents, losing even the feeble hope he'd always clung to that this time, _this time_ they wouldn't be gone so long.

To hell with the outcome, he threw himself at her feet and wrapped his arms around her and pressed his face to the belly in which she'd carried him, hiding his tears from everyone but her, and –

"Ben. Ben? Oh, _Ben_."

And he was home. That was all that mattered. The Dark Side, destiny, duty, it all paled next to this, had never compared, not the way he had tried to convince himself for so long.

He'd made it home.

**I-oOo-I**

Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined failing Snoke so utterly could be so freeing. Everything was suddenly so easy. He thought he may have finally figured out the Jedi way; freedom though detachment, the peace of letting go of everything but this one perfect, glorious snapshot of the present.

The trick, as it turned out, was knowing how happy you were _before_ it was all taken away from you.

The data cube stayed behind in the curl of his mother's fingers when he dropped his hands to his knees, palms-up and open. He looked up at her and she looked down at him, his own tears mirrored in her eyes, and it was enough. Whether it was a neck shot or stun cuffs or a dose of hypercompliance juice or something else coming for him with thundering footsteps from what felt like a galaxy away, it didn't matter. That terrible, hungering void at the center of him that sucked in all the light and no extreme of devotion had ever been able to fill, was finally sated. Now that he had this, he was strong enough to do anything, had the power to withstand whatever the universe might throw at him.

Because Mom was alive and he'd made it home before the end. He'd done something right for once, and someone he loved was proud of him and loved him back for it. Letting the Resistance interrogate and execute him would take no effort at all, now.

Voices shouted somewhere inconsequential and far away.

He pulled his lips into his best recollection of a smile; tried to tell her without words how sorry he was, and how much he loved her, and that whatever happened next, it was okay.

Her hand came up to cover her mouth, eyes closing tightly for a bracing moment. The shouting got louder. One of the voices had recognized him, many others his shuttle; none of it mattered. She searched his face and her presence in the Force flooded his, fumbling through unknown motions, groping and plucking, starved for knowledge of him. She couldn't articulate what she was looking for, so he simply gave her everything.

Someone grabbed her arm.

She freed herself so aggressively it would have been startling had they not been pressed mind-to-mind, bleeding into one another, her perceptions and decisions as obvious to him as his thoughts and memories were to her.

"My b-boy," she whispered, breath stuttering in her lungs, and he could feel a mountain moving in her heart as she did. "My son." Something horrible and suffocating crumbled to dust, and it was as if she (he, they) could breathe for the first time in ten years. "My baby."

As shock rippled through the air and the Force both, she cupped his face between warm, weathered hands and engulfed his heart in hers. The universe tilted on its axis. Something long-absent slotted into place where it always ought to have been. His tears were mirrored in her eyes, the eyes he'd inherited from her, and in their souls was a matching, single-minded, all-consuming –

_Oh,_ he thought, stunned. _Oh, wow._

It wasn't the end. Not if his mother had anything to say about it.


	2. II - An Unwanted Gift (I)

In which redemption does not, in fact, equal death, and feelings about this are mixed.

**_II – An Unwanted Gift_**

He had been foolish to abandon the Order the way he had. On some level, he'd known it even as he'd done it. He had succumbed to exactly that weakness Snoke had always cautioned him against, and he'd been beyond caring. _Ten wretched years_ beyond giving even one more Force-forsaken damn. It hadn't mattered what awaited him where he ended up; he wouldn't have lasted another minute where he was.

Not that the Resistance had any reason to care about that.

Someone had donated a belt to tie his hands with, which his mother had snatched from their hands with an impatient set to her mouth and wrapped around his wrists herself. No unnecessary loss of circulation there. Rey, wide-eyed, had been appointed to stand guard over him. She lurked at the edge of his vision, neither of them speaking.

Who was he and why was he here, had been the obvious first questions.

His answer – Kylo Ren, son of their General and the Rebel hero he himself had killed barely three weeks ago, coming home, back to where he belonged – was met with stunned disbelief. His mother's – that he was Ben Solo, her son, who had killed Snoke, escaped the First Order's influence, and returned to them at long last – with the beginnings of a revolt.

"Oh, are we going to have another mutiny?" she had inquired in a voice that made her seem three meters tall, or perhaps everyone around her the size of a naughty child. She'd held her cane like a sword. "Because the last one worked out so well?"

It had pulled the brewing storm back to perch tense and trembling on the edge of boiling over, but no further.

"Did General Rabies depose you or something?" one Resistance fighter had asked, eyes uncannily sharp over the edge of her blaster.

No.

"Was he about to?"

Not right that second, but eventually? Without a doubt.

"Oh, you think we're your contingency plan or something?"

His _what?_ Don't make him laugh.

"So you've had a change of heart, is all?"

That was one way to put it.

"And instead of coming up with an excuse to refrain from acting on your intel, or withdrawing your scouts, or calling off the invasion of my home system or _anything_, you – your first priority was to throw the universe to the other boar-wolves so you could come crying to Mommy? That's what you call a 'change of heart'?!"

And get shot in the back all the sooner, just so the next-in-line in the chain of command could course-correct and make any situation he had tried to improve worse than ever in retaliation? Because _that_ would have been so helpf–

At that point, his mother had nipped any further discussion in the bud with a sharp word, but the seed had been planted and the mood set.

For himself included. His tranquil fugue couldn't last forever, not without the conviction that it would be the last thing he'd ever do, that the unassailable freedom of death awaited him at the end of it. And a lot of space had been cleared in his mind recently, both literally and figuratively. So there was plenty of room in him, too, for the ignoble truth of his defection to make an impact, ripple across his conscience, and sink in until it settled somewhere deep and dark.

There he was: Supreme Leader of the First Order. Wielding ultimate authority over the strongest military force in the universe, and instead of _using_ that authority, instead of being smart about it or thinking strategically or looking at the long term and the bigger picture – instead of figuring out how to protect his mother now that he was finally ready to admit how desperately he wanted her safe and his father alive – he walked away from it all with only a lightsaber and a data cube and the clothes on his back. Practically empty-handed. His warning got the Resistance off the First Order's radar again – _he_ had found them, so that their location was compromised was undeniable, and as such fleeing took priority over questioning him – but that was it. Nothing to show for the boundless potential he had held.

Story of his life, really.

Stupid. Weak and stupid stupid _stupid_.

His mother didn't call him on it in that first moment _or_ after, perhaps too overcome with the return of her prodigal son to reprimand him for much of anything just yet. But her people were there to pick up the slack before long. _All_ her people, gaunt-faced and banged-up and carrying their dead in their bearing like lost limbs.

There wasn't enough of the Resistance left to separate the brass from the grunts, the decision-makers from the followers, so everything they wanted to do to him, they did out in the open for all to see. Every question they asked, he was expected to answer loud enough for everyone to hear. The urgently practical and the nastily personal and everything in-between.

Why should they trust Kylo Ren, was the entirely valid question underlying all others, and why should they delay meting out the Jedi Killer's rightful punishment? Plus, more emotionally, and infinitely more effective at digging into the cracks in his armor: why should they allow that man into their midst, near their General, when he offered them so little in return for everything he had taken from them?

His change of heart wasn't good enough. Not to buy him what he was asking for. _He_ wasn't good enough.

Not for anyone but his mother. And perhaps the biggest question of all was: did she count?

(She was the only one who counted, but he knew better than to say that out loud.

"This isn't going to be pleasant, for anyone," she'd warned him as the Falcon jumped to safety, not long after: "Absolutely not. I'm not letting you out of my sight again. I trust my people, but not _that_ blindly. I'll put a bassinet in my bedroom for you again if I have to."

"I can handle it," he'd assured her both times.

"And I'm afraid..." she'd whispered, her voice taking on a frayed edge as she squeezed his hands, "that even if we both live to see the end of the First Order, the restoration of a just government will..."

"It doesn't matter, Mom. I don't care. I'm here _now_."

"But _I_ care, Ben. You're – you were – _I care._"

She hadn't hated him for what he'd done when they sensed each other across the battlefield. She wasn't asking him about _it_ now that they were sitting across from each other. It undid him in every unguarded moment.

"Right. Sorry. Alright." He'd let her draw him into a hug and press her face into his shoulder – chuckling wetly, "When did you get so tall?" – and stopped thinking of anything other than squeezing back. "Alright.")

The Resistance was hurting and wanting and still reeling, and more than any concrete problem with his presence or potential as an ally, the fact that he'd come running to them _after_ reducing them to that state felt like a slap to the face. A copy of the First Order's central database would have been invaluable a month ago, might even be useful again a year into the future, but right now they had not a single starfighter and barely enough rations to go around.

Where were _their_ loved ones? Where did he get the Force-forsaken _nerve_ to show up without them, miraculously alive?

That wasn't something his mother could answer for him, so he took on any question he could and told them everything he knew, as neutral-honest as he could manage through the rising boil of his emotions. And when he could no longer manage, he slammed his fists into the table, stood so quickly it sent his chair clattering to the floor, bared his teeth at the multitude of blasters immediately aimed at him, and said:

"Fine. You're right. I didn't come here out of the goodness of my heart. I came for the purely selfish reason of wanting to reunite with my mother. I thought she was dead, and when I found out she wasn't my response was stupid and self-serving and childish. I didn't even stop to consider how I could keep her safe beyond the first hyperspace jump, that's how short-sighted I was in my desire to see her. Is that what you want to hear?"

He was no great orator. That skill had passed him by. But he'd been through the 'enough excuses' routine enough times with Snoke, on his knees and already jittery as his body calculated the price of his failure ahead of his mind, to launch himself into it without a second thought.

That he could do it standing tall this time made it almost cathartic.

"Yes, I've come to you with more war crimes than peace offerings. But I am _here_, and as long as I live, I won't abandon or sit and watch harm come to my mother again. Her _or_ you. You're my mother's people, so you're _my_ people too now. I'll fight her fight, _your_ fight. I'm not suited for the Light, but if there's one thing you can trust me to be good at, it is to fight."

The hands around some blasters lowered, slowly and cautiously. The faces behind many more pulled into sneers.

His mother lay a firm but gentle hand on his arm. Their eyes met. He couldn't read any particular thing from her expression, not out here in front of so many people, but she held his gaze until he was no longer breathing quite so heavily. She flicked an eyebrow, and he demonstratively turned his back to the blasters to right his chair, and sat down.

"I would swear an oath," he said, voice dripping with sarcasm he was no longer wearing a voice-distorting helmet to disguise. "But I can't _make_ you believe me. I brought you intel and I brought you me. Take it or leave it."

"Damn right he can't make me believe him," a man near the front of the crowd muttered, a bit too loudly to keep it just between him and the people sitting closest to him. There was a bandage around his head. Maybe he really didn't recognize his volume, but he probably did. "He already killed his father, nothing he says about the General is worth a damn."

Nobody shushed him or told him to keep his voice down.

Nobody had taken well to the sudden connecting of dots between 'Kylo Ren, Darth Vader reborn' and 'Ben Solo, most famous and promising victory kid of them all, second-generation Rebel and Jedi, long presumed dead'.

All the mother of the father-killer said was a strained but iron-clad: "This is the second time in as many weeks that Ben has had a clear line of sight on me and refused to pull the trigger despite clear orders from or advantages to the First Order. That's proof enough to me that he means what he says."

It was only an unshakeable respect for their General and the privateness of her grief, even in the face of her deception, of _him_, that kept the Resistance from demanding he answer for her husband's death right then and there. That kept them from saying to her, 'this is none of your business; step aside and let us decide how you should feel about the crimes against the great Princess Leia Organa, the famous General Solo, the legendary Luke Skywalker'. There was a sentiment thick in the air, all the more potent for remaining unspoken, that the Resistance – this scraped-together band of strangers and nobodies and _self-righteous bantha-sucking scumbags_ who had met Han Solo once in their sorry little lives if they were lucky but most likely only ever swooned and tittered and creamed themselves over the sanitized, overblown legend of him – had more of a claim to and say over his own father and his death and memory than he did.

It was so appalling, so obscene, so blindingly enraging and _terrifying_, he did something he had trained himself for the better part of a decade never to do: he stepped away from that seething darkness in the Force and walled himself off from it until he could pretend there was nothing left to ignore. That of all the reasons these people despised him, the one every quaking cell in his body agreed with wasn't one of them.

(One mind lost in the churning crowd throbbed with flashes of runny white paint on long strings of bombs meant for First Order warships, depicting sharp-toothed smiles or spelling out 'Han Solo says hi'. Gone. The defected Stormtrooper kept replaying that unforgivable moment on the dark bridge in his mind, so clearly and loudly it seemed almost deliberate. Gone.

Chewie hadn't even been able to step into the room. On the other side of the walls, an endless, ululating wail in the Force – _gone_.)

No, they just hated him because he was First Order and had helped kill more of their people than he'd cared to count and his mastery of the Dark Side was terrifying to their paltry minds. What more reason did they need, anyway?

_'What do you want me to do,'_ he'd practically sneered, _'swear an oath you won't believe anyway?'_

But a woman with a tattooed face and hard eyes yelled _"Swear that oath!"_ from the back of the room. "Our words have meaning in the Force. Swear it and I'll believe you!"

It was just one woman, he thought, aggressively on the defensive and ready to stay that way for at least a week. He would manage without her approval. He didn't need _any_ of their approval.

But these were his mother's chosen people. Her entire Resistance fit into this one room, and he had played far too great a part in making it that way. He owed it to _her_. So he stood again, less forcefully this time, and did as the tattooed woman asked. He swore on his life, on his honor, on the Force, and promised the Resistance all the same damn things he'd given Snoke for so many years. Everything he had, any part of him that was still worth anything: theirs. His command of the Force and the strength in his arms, the breath in his lungs and every last drop of blood in his veins: theirs. The Resistance, its people, its cause: his. He would protect it always and harm it never. He swore it.

The tattooed woman squeezed her way to the front of the crowd and grabbed his forearm across the table. A warrior's handshake, and a warrior's eyes.

"The universe has heard you, Ben Solo," she said. It wasn't friendly, but it was full of conviction. "Welcome back."

** I-oOo-I**

Eventually, his mother decided enough was enough and dismissed everyone to what passed for their stations or duties in the derelict space station the Resistance had taken refuge in for the time being. It hadn't _exactly_ been a formal decision-making process, and his fate wasn't _exactly_ put up to popular vote. But the Resistance seemed, just barely, willing to put him to use for the time being instead of executing him on the spot.

It was probably the most fraught and chaotic 'come meet our new recruit' meeting in history. After ten years with the Order, it was unprofessional enough to make his skin crawl. No military outfit with _proper_ training, or respect for command structures, or discipline in general, would have fallen into disarray like this. Never had it been more obvious that the Resistance's main recruitment pool was the kind of people that washed out of the New Republic Navy because of disciplinary issues.

Nevertheless, General Leia Organa was the beating heart of this organization. Her word was not law, but it counted for enough. Practicality – the knowledge that they were in no position to waste _anything_ he had to offer – did the rest.

His mother squeezed his shoulder and followed her last few rebels out with a significant glance over his shoulder and a murmured, "Come find me in a bit. I'm going to make some arrangements."

When he was no longer holding every eye, Rey finally pushed out of her shadowy corner and approached him. ("He killed Snoke to save my life and no other reason," she had contributed, blank-faced. "Whenever we met before, I sensed his conflict and doubt. Now I see the conviction of a choice well-made. On the Supremacy _and_ here.") She'd put her hair up in buns again, as he knew she'd done every day but one since her parents had sold her. Like many of the Resistance, she looked tired and tense and still a little banged-up.

The room swam with the disjointed echoes of so much strong emotion, and when he stood and tucked in his chair, he felt as if cast adrift in it, cut off from the rest of the universe by the current. It was almost like the connection they had shared so briefly and lost so cruelly, and perhaps because of that, strangely mollifying.

"Rey," he said.

"Ben," she answered. Her mouth was doing a familiar dozen-things-at-once that spoke of indecisiveness. "You're here."

"A day late and a credit short."

Biting her lip, she shook her head. "You're here now. That's what matters."

He studied her face. As soon as she noticed, she wrestled her mouth into submission, squared her shoulders, and presented him with her best mental and physical lock-and-key. If he remembered how, he might have smiled.

"Is that your personal opinion or a philosophical standpoint?" he asked, out loud, like the Force-less savages she clearly wanted to pretend they were to each other.

"A little bit of both."

"I see."

Just for a moment, she let her mouth settle into a wistful and crooked little smile, and he felt an accompanying warmth bloom at the edge of his mind. "If I'd known this was all it took back in Snoke's throne room, I would've left you the binary beacon your mother gave me instead of your lightsaber."

_If I'd known, I wouldn't have done what I did either,_ he wanted to say. But that kind of certainty was for Lightsiders. She may be willing to believe it, but he wasn't.

He ducked his head down toward her, scrutiny intensifying. "You don't seem angry."

"No, I am. But I'm also glad you're finally here. A day late and a credit short, but –"

She looked away and crossed her arms. Her presence in the Force drew in on itself, fading from his. Neither of them had any way of knowing exactly how much of the fleet had been destroyed before Snoke's death and how much after. But obviously the answer was 'too much' either way.

When she met his eyes once more, she was indecisive all the way through again. "I still failed, but at least I no longer feel like an idiot for trying at all."

An unexpected tension bled from his shoulders when he exhaled. On inhale, he was surprised to find something like mercy taking its place.

"I'm sorry I couldn't be what you wanted," he started quietly – and somehow, from one moment to the next, she melted. Like _that_ was the kind of turning point she'd been waiting for. She smiled, wide and honest, and overflowed with a hope and happiness and affection so potent it cracked through him like lightning.

"Don't speak too soon," she said. "I'm pretty sure you just won yourself a second chance."

And like with any other lash of (_hope, longing, light_) lightning he had borne, he shook it off and pushed through. "You misunderstand."

Something in his voice or his face or mind gave her pause. Slowly, the curve of her smile turned into a razor-edged stare. The warm current chilled with apprehension.

"I've never been able to be what people wanted me to be, Rey. Even my mother loves me in spite of what I am, not because of it. Don't look at me like that, it's not an insult." Rey's entire body seemed to puff up with indignation on her behalf. "I killed my father her husband, I killed my uncle her brother, I've been complicit in some of the greatest atrocities in known history. It's a miracle she can still stand the sight of me at all." He tried to gentle his voice. To do as a Lightsider would do, just this once. "I'm here now. I meant every word I said. But I don't want you getting your hopes up for nothing. I don't know any other way to be than as I am. I never have."

"I see," she said. Lock and key.

**I-oOo-I**

He left the room alone. A tall, grey-haired man he vaguely recognized as an old Rebel fell into step with him. Cooperation and supervision. That was all they asked.

For now.

His heavy, booted footsteps echoed out through the halls of the station, and what echoed back were names and titles and legacies and expectations, a hundred preconceived notions both old and new. He could remember thinking, the last time he carried the original ones as a boy, not yet blooded and perhaps even innocent, that they were impossibly heavy. Now they just didn't feel quite real.

_Fuck, he's going to kill us all in our sleep, isn't he?_ he heard a mind he didn't bother looking at the face of think as he passed.

_Poor Leia,_ thought another. _She doesn't deserve a family like that._

_We might have two Jedi now! Oh, he better be for real._

_He's even uglier than he looked in the holos as a child, what a waste of good genes._

_But 'seduced to the Dark Side' is so vague, I wonder what actually happened. Must have been big, to turn the General's own son away from her._

_I could make it look like an accident. If he sets one foot out of line..._

_If Kylo Ren can turn, anyone can. Whis is why we're going to win. Good always prevails._

_Joining up was a mistake, that whole family is rotten, they should have thrown them all in jail when we found out she was Sithspawn, not let her build an army._

_Leia and Rey had better know what they're doing, vouching for this guy._

_We won't need those fucking cowards anymore if we play this card right._

_The girl will keep him in line. The girl will take care of it when we're done with him. As long as we've got the girl, he's nothing to be afraid of._

Kylo Ren. Ben Solo.

They no longer sounded as different as they once did. They were merely different flavors of _traitor-murderer-caution-prisoner-weapon_ now. A despicable ally nobody had asked for.

Putting up with these people's distaste for him couldn't be any harder than working with Hux for so long without murdering the bastard. But he couldn't let their hostility spread to his mother, too. What would it take to win them over? He hadn't expected any less than the Resistance's hatred and fear, but not even in his wildest dreams had he imagined his mother would deny her warriors their rightful pound of flesh and instead return his reconciliatory gesture with such a blatant display of favoritism. In his memories, her dedication to what was right and just took precedence over everything else – himself very much included.

Yesterday, everything had seemed so simple. Amazing that he could see the absurdity of that only now.

If her organization turned on her because of him, he would have been better off not coming at all. How could he convince them that his mother strong-arming them into accepting him into the fold was the right thing to do when everything they thought of him was true?

_Traitor. Murderer. Monster._

But she had said _'come find me'_, and neither of them had wasted words on how. So he let everyone else's thoughts wash over and away from him as he made his way towards the warmth of his mother's presence, which called out to him in wordless whispers that meant only _son_.

**II-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-I-oOo-I-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-II**

_**To Be Continued**_


	3. II - An Unwanted Gift (II)

Out of necessity, General Organa effectively locked him away from what passed for 'the general public' for a while. Considering the circumstances, the information and insight he had to offer was more important than a speedy integration into the ranks. For days on end, he saw only her and whoever she considered qualified or educatable on the subject at hand. She didn't like it, but that had never stopped her from pursuing the wisest course of action.

Meanwhile, Poe Dameron lay in wait for him tirelessly.

It was the only conclusion he could come to, because the very first moment he found himself alone outside of his assigned quarters, with his mother neither at his side nor intending to be in the immediate future and his semi-formal guard detail showing their informal side, Poe and the Stormtrooper – Finn, they were calling the guy – cornered him.

He obediently let them herd him into an empty room and back him into the nearest wall. It made every conversation with the Resistance easier, he was finding, if he indulged their delusions of controlling him.

(He had to remind himself constantly that he was no longer surrounded by subordinates. That when these people flanked him or gave him a wide berth, the accompanying hatred and fear were not offset by resentful obedience. Almost as often, he was reminded that he was no longer subservient himself. Conflicts with Snoke had meant a struggle to rein in his fight-or-flight instincts that could last for days after. Conflict with his new comrades meant a vivid mental image of cracking their skulls against the nearest hull and realizing it wasn't worth having to explain that to his mother before he even remembered he'd solemnly sworn not to harm them.)

Many seemed to think that surrendering his lightsaber to Rey neutralized the worst of the threat he posed, and he nor Rey nor his mother had discouraged that impression. Poe and Finn – the Stormtrooper, though, they knew better than most. The Stormtrooper's thoughts were understandably vicious, winging in circles as he read the air currents for danger, but with his talons constantly snapping in warning ahead of him. His blaster was in his hand, and he made sure it was clearly visible. But there was an odd lack of malice radiating from Poe. Ten different flavors of dark thoughts and negative emotions, to be sure, but there was something holding the bulk of it back.

"You're Kylo Ren," Poe said without preamble. "The guy who broke into my brain."

"Yes. I apologize."

"Huh?" said Poe, thrown, while the Stormtrooper choked on his breath.

He shrugged, eyebrows rising and mouth twisting in a show of non-hostility. "This is new territory for me. If my apologies aren't up to snuff, I can apologize for that too."

For a moment, they stared at him like he'd grown a second head. Then Poe shook himself.

"Not the point. You're Kylo Ren."

"Yes," he repeated patiently.

"You tortured me."

"Yes."

"And you're Ben Solo."

"Yes."

"My old buddy."

"What?" he said.

"_What?_" the Stormtrooper said.

"We grew up together," said Poe.

Now it was his turn to make an incredulous face. "No we didn't."

"Our parents were close, so we were second-hand close. Second generation close."

"We saw each other twice a year at best."

Poe leaned in and jabbed a finger into his chest in time with his words. "You. Were. My. _Buddy._"

"How many buddies do you have?!" the Stormtrooper cried out, betrayed.

"I liked you!" Poe went on. "You had a wicked sense of humor! I was at all your birthdays!"

"What, why?" the Stromtrooper said.

As one, he and Poe said: "It's on Galactic Concordance Day."

A resounding silence fell.

"We met _on_ my birthdays, not _for_ my birthdays. And just now didn't mean anything," he insisted. He remembered a bit of what Poe was like; better to head that off at the pass.

Poe swallowed thickly. "No. Because once upon a time you _were_ my buddy Ben Solo, but then you massacred a temple full of Jedi and joined the First Order, and now you're Kylo Ren, who tortured me. _Why?_"

...oh, dammit.

His skin seemed to ice over. With a blitheness that seemed to come to him from another dimension, he said: "_Technically_ I didn't torture you. Torture is rarely if ever effective. Mindprobing is a far superior strategy. Though it hurts more the harder you resist, so I understand your confusion."

Scowling, Poe opened his mouth.

"But as for the why, I think there was something about a droid and a map," he went on.

"Ha, ha, ha," Poe ground out.

"And if you want to get all philosophical about it, I had my orders just as you had yours."

"Don't play smart with me, asshole."

He would have loved to keep going, but it was getting harder and harder to breathe evenly. His face was going numb and stiff and weird. "Does it matter? It won't change what happened."

"It matters to _me_," Poe said with a look so fierce it almost circled back into pleading.

His heart rate kept climbing, beating like a war drum. He balled his hands into fists and dug his shoulder blades into the wall. He'd heard the pinch in his own voice. Never a good sign. (If he could hear it, Snoke could hear it. Snoke was dead, but it still felt like he could hear it.)

He worked his jaw until it cracked. Of course, of all the things they could ask of him, it would be _this_. Should have seen it coming. _Dammit_.

"You won't even believe me."

"Try me!"

A harsh tremor settled in his hands. Clenching more tightly to still them and squash the urge to bash a skull against a wall, he raised his chin and his eyebrows both: _are you sure about that?_

"My uncle tried to murder me in my sleep. Unprovoked."

Poe stared.

The Stormtrooper stared.

He stared back defiantly, the throb of his pulse in his ears deforming all other sounds.

"...bantha shit," Poe said eventually, eyes wide.

"See?" he spat.

"You honestly expect us to believe that?" the Stormtrooper spat right back.

"No," he said, heavy with bitter resignation. "People don't usually do."

"Well, you having a temper tantrum and killing twelve people because someone pissed you off, _that_ I believe," the Stormtrooper went on. "Couldn't go a week by the end there without wrecking the place, the way I heard it."

But Poe's face was falling, eyes searching his expression, and very, very quietly, he concluded: "You're serious."

He took a deep breath, willing his body to calm and his voice to steady.

"My uncle decided I was too dangerous to live and tried to murder me in my sleep. I defended myself and fled. I wasn't about to go home and find out whether my mother and father agreed with him. They were the ones who sent me to Skywalker for reeducation in the first place. Instead, I went to the only other person I could think of: Snoke. You know the rest."

"Poe, you're not seriously listening to him?" the Stormtrooper hissed, grabbing his friend's sleeve. "He's obviously lying. I mean, look at everything he's done since. Even _if_ Skywalker attacked first, which is the opposite of what makes sense, there's no way he _didn't_ have a reason. This is Luke Skywalker we're talking about!"

"He was always a terrible liar," Poe said absently. He was looking at him like he'd never seen him before, as Ben Solo _or_ Kylo Ren.

There was a time when Poe used to sit on him – literally sit on top of him – when they got caught doing something they shouldn't and he thought Ben might give them away with his inability to keep his expressions in check. The memory was like a punch to the gut.

"He's _Kylo Ren_."

_A _notoriously_ terrible liar,_ he thought to himself. Snoke didn't like his right-hand man able to lie to him. Didn't want him getting any ideas about trying to deceive him and carry on the Darkside tradition of apprentices overthrowing their masters.

He tried to remember the way Snoke's torso had separated from his legs, his eyes unseeing as his presence in the Force popped like a bubble and all the cracks in Kylo Ren's mind so long filled to bursting with his master suddenly emptied. But all he could think of was his father's hand coming up to touch his face when he'd already ignited his lightsaber through his chest, and his mother slipping through his fingers and fading to nothing right in front of him, and Rey's eyes when she looked up at him, ransacked and brutalized and brought low before him like an animal to be slaughtered.

"So not only did you _not_ bring it on yourself, Skywalker was secretly a dozen Jedi in an oversized bathrobe?" the Stormtrooper demanded, scornful scepticism dripping from every word. "Is that why you killed so many people for one man's actions, that what you're saying?"

_You will not strike,_ he told himself savagely. _You will not run. And you will not fucking_ bow, _to Snoke's demands or Skywalker's sanctimonious memory or anything else. No more. Enough._

He pushed off the wall and loomed, pressing his gut right into the muzzle of the Stormtrooper's hastily raised blaster. Poe watched, alert.

"First of all, I don't care what lies they told to cover up the truth of what Skywalker did, but there were fourteen of us there and eight of us walked away alive, myself and Skywalker included. Secondly, so sorry if my very first 'crime' wasn't senselessly excessive enough for your liking, but no. Even I had to ease into the habit of wanton murder," he bit out acerbically. "I killed two of them because people have never wanted to believe me about my uncle, starting with them. As far as they were concerned, I was a liar and a murderer. It was me or Skywalker, and as far as any of us knew at the time, I was the only one who walked away alive. That was all the proof they needed. I was a confirmed threat and my uncle _obviously_ had a perfectly good reason for doing what he did, so it was their duty to finish what Skywalker started without stopping to ask themselves _why_. To avenge him. Blindly. Sound familiar?"

"By my count that leaves four unaccounted for. Keep talking."

The Stormtrooper's mind was as transparent as it had been on Jakku, his overly brave face and caricature of a firm voice a pathetic excuse for a mask. This guy had made his way through life with the First Order with a well-nigh spotless record only to crack under the pressure, break through the life-long brainwashing, and turn traitor in a matter of hours. He couldn't be _that_ bad of an actor. And yet.

His hatred and disgust for this man was second only to his hatred and disgust for Skywalker. And that was the only reason he continued.

"After the first pair, it was chaos. Everybody had their lightsabers out and nobody could agree on what to do with them. Who to point them at, where the danger would come from next. I don't know who set it off and who killed who or why, I was –" – too busy trying not to faint or vomit, too busy begging the Force for he couldn't even remember what, it had been so childish and absurd and futile – "– otherwise occupied. But someone inevitably jumped the blaster, and then there was no stopping it."

Maybe it would have ended with his death, or when he picked a random direction to run in and somebody finally took a moment to call in the nearest authorities. Maybe one of them would have pulled themselves together, grabbed a blaster, and set it to stun. Maybe there would have eventually been a natural lull in the maelstrom of fear and blame and death that had swallowed the temple, long enough for the tide of Darkness to be turned, and it would have ended with fewer fellow students dead in the dew-slick grass and none of them lost to –

The boy he had been might have come out of that night almost intact – a blow to the head, a severed limb, a burn painful enough to incapacitate him – and gotten dragged home still Ben Solo, to whatever sentence they gave to people so inherently defective even Luke Skywalker, who had sworn up and down only months before that he'd brought Darth Vader back to the Light before the end, didn't want to risk letting them live.

But he hadn't.

He still had dreams about it. His uncle standing over his bed, the weapon of legends raised to strike and killing intent dark in his heart. Sabers flashing in the night, blue and green and silver and gold. Ghostly flashes of familiar faces gone fearful and bloodthirsty. The dying screams of people he had lived and worked and occasionally even laughed with for five years. It had felt like a nightmare he couldn't wake up from for days afterwards, and hadn't stopped haunting his sleep since.

"When I called out for help into the Force, Snoke heard me. And he had a plan. The only way out we could see at the time. I'd killed the first two, the ones who attacked with no questions asked. The Knights of Ren – my _would-be_ Knights, those who did believe me, or who simply weren't content to stand by and let me be murdered in front of them – they killed the rest," he said. "That was the only condition to Snoke's offer of sanctuary. All we had to do was kill anyone who might have been able to track us down through the Force and lead the New Republic to Snoke. In return he would shelter us from people like my uncle and those other students and everybody else in the galaxy who would rather dismiss the truth out of hand and silence us."

(What he didn't add was how he had given the final go ahead – yes, I hear it too, yes, I know that voice, yes, I trust it, yes, we should do as it says – only to fucking _freeze_ the moment he looked his next opponent in the eye. Skywalker's propaganda had made sickness boil hot in his stomach, but he didn't tell Poe and the Stormtrooper what a pathetic child he had been at the time, how unfit for bloodshed. He refused to let on how much training it had taken before he learned not to shut down for any reason. Not Lightside morality, not attachment and compassion and other such sentiment, not pain or fear, not overwhelming odds or the horror of the challenge, and no matter how endless the nightmare. _Real_ training, not the almost reluctant, 'spiritual balance above all else, _Ben,_' sword fighting Skywalker had taught him, but proper, life-and-death, using his strength and power the way it was meant to, fighting to _survive_ and _destroy_. He didn't tell them that that night, he had spent most of the remaining fight being protected, and the rest, defending himself with more wild lashing out than by applying his prodigal skill.

He had _some_ dignity to uphold. And besides, no good would come from pointing out how much he had grown since that night, how many shortcomings Ben Solo had defeated to allow Kylo Ren to emerge. _'The only way to overcome your weakness is to kill it – and your old self along with it,'_ Snoke used to say. And he had. That weak, sniveling, worthless boy who'd never been anything but excess weight was dead. He wouldn't want him back even if it made Poe and the Stormtrooper fall in worship at his feet.)

The Stormtrooper's expression wavered, the raptor of his mind faltering just a bit before regaining its place on the currents. But Poe spoke before the righteous defector could collect himself and retaliate.

"You really thought your mom and dad would..."

He looked more stricken than he had reason to be. He'd said it himself; Kylo Ren wasn't his childhood buddy Ben. Kylo Ren was the beast who'd torn the location of a long-awaited hero from his mind with no regard for the damage his claws would do, and got almost all of Poe's true friends, his brothers and sisters in arms, killed as a result.

But then the words registered, and it all made sense.

If his heart had ever worked properly, it might have broken on his parents' behalf along with Poe's. To be so mistrusted by their own flesh and blood. To be hurt so badly and lose so much because of it.

But no nightmare went on forever, not even the one he had woken up to his last night at the temple. Ben Solo – or at least the parts of him that mattered to anyone but himself – hadn't remained that nineteen-year-old blinded by terror forever. After his old life ended, he had built a new one. Kylo Ren had set himself toward a goal, and _(no good had ever come from giving Snoke anything but his full devotion and conviction)_ he had walked his chosen path with purpose, no matter how far it led him from home.

"Yes. No," he said, calmly now. "My _uncle_ had, I didn't know _what_ to think. Hindsight makes everything look obvious, but at the time – I didn't want to find out."

"So killing all those people was the better option?"

"I didn't think it was a reason you would approve of, but it's the truth, whether you like it or not. And that's what you wanted to know, isn't it? What really happened to Ben Solo? _That's_ what happened."

Poe opened his mouth, but ultimately found nothing to say.

The Stormtrooper's expression was closed-off, lips pressed tightly together. His thoughts were practically screaming Han Solo's face, which is how he knew this conversation had to end. Right now.

When he gently shouldered past them, more careful of his own bulk and strength than he had been in years, they didn't stop him. Over his shoulder, he told Poe:

"As I said: it doesn't change the ten years after. I'm not that kid you knew anymore. I'm the guy responsible for everything that came after, and the one who has pledged himself to keeping your General safe from the consequences. Sob stories aren't going to do that. My actions will. I chose my path and I walked it. Into the First Order _and_ out of it."

**II-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-I-oOo-I-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-II**

_**To Be Continued**_


	4. II - An Unwanted Gift (III)

But it seemed _something_ had changed.

Two days later, the Resistance had successfully evaded detection as they abandoned the space station, and his mother sent him out to collect two lunch trays for them from the new mountain base's mess hall. Poe popped into his personal space, took the second tray from his hands, passed it on to a tiny blonde – "Kaydel, bring this to the General for me, please. I'm requisitioning Ben. Leia won't mind if you take an hour's break from the hypotheticals to talk something more concrete, right? Right." – and steered him towards a table.

"So I talked to your mom about those things you said, and then some other stuff, also concerning you," Poe started, sounding for all the world like he was talking about the weather.

Oh, for the love of – wasn't once enough? Were they really going to keep tormenting him with this? At least when Snoke coached him on how to use the memories to deepen his connection to the Dark Side, it had served the purpose of preparing Kylo Ren for the inevitable rematch awaiting him. Bringing it up now could only serve to ruin everything. Again.

"Did you talk to your mom about it yet? Because the look on her face when I brought it up, and when Rey said Luke had actually _admitted_ it to her – seriously, I have no words. You should _really_ talk to your mom about these kinds of things before you spill it to your sworn enemies, Ben."

_What's the difference?_ he thought.

But the fact of the matter was that he had not, he did not intend to, and since she hadn't already, he doubted _she_ would bring it up any time soon. Unlike Poe and Rey, apparently, he had barely spoken to his mother since they'd started moving out of the space station and into this base. She had appeared distracted and detached in exactly the same way she used to get when she had an important senatorial job on her plate, so he'd made sure not to be in her way. They all had bigger things to worry about than the day his mother may or may not have decided her son needed to die.

(Even if she had, it clearly didn't matter anymore. Maybe he'd evaded his sentence long enough for the statute of limitations to kick in, or maybe –

No. No, what was he thinking? She'd found enough love for him inside herself to want to keep him after all. It was that simple. Whether that meant the options that were off the table were limited to sending him away to another place like Skywalker's temple or if they included condemning him to death herself, it didn't matter. His mother wasn't the one he had to fear a repeat of either of those things from.

Nothing good could come from forcing a confession out of her about things a decade in the past, anyway. There wasn't enough blame and hatred left in him any longer to make the answer he feared worthwhile. He'd lived this long in uncertainty. The only conclusion he could come to anymore was that he still loved her regardless. Shouldn't that be what mattered?)

(He had fought tooth and nail against it mattering when he reunited with his father, and look what happened.)

"But anyway, I understand you're a fighter pilot on top of everything else?"

He hadn't intended for it to be a question, but such was the effort it took to change his mental gears. "Yes?"

"A _good_ fighter pilot?" Poe asked.

"Sure," he said. "But as you might imagine, I'm rusty on my alphabet-wings."

"Well, we don't have any more 'wings right now, so that's hardly an issue. But you're up-to-date on all the latest TIE models, right?"

He wasn't sure how he felt about this turn of events. Poe's attitude, that was – and Poe talking to his mother – and _Rey_ talking to his mother – but not the direction the conversation seemed to be taking. Other than keeping his mother afloat on a steady stream of intel and insights, he still wasn't sure what he was going to be or should be doing here. Just as he hadn't thought further ahead than keeping Rey alive when he killed Snoke, he hadn't been thinking about anything more concrete than _Mom's alive, Mom, home, Mom_, when he left the Order.

These kinds of decisions always worked out just fine for him, until they didn't.

Was he properly regretful of the blood on his hands? Determined to destroy everything he had worked for, these past ten years? Trying to build a new life? Willing to face the consequences of his actions? Desperate to dedicate himself to the Light?

(Glad to have killed the master who had hurt and cherished him in equal measure, who saved him from his family, cupped his soot-stained, tear-streaked face in his hands, nurtured his broken heart, raised him from the ashes, and made him who he was today?)

Probably not.

A project to get involved in was more than welcome. The farce of camaraderie, on the other hand, he didn't know how to feel about.

"I test-pilot them, so yes, I should think I'm up on my TIEs. Which we don't have any of either."

Poe smirked. "So why don't we go and _get_ ourselves some?"

Poe's easy joviality was little more than a coat of paint on a durasteel hull, his smile the torn edge of a ship that would cut heedless fingers to the bone in retaliation for the violence that had blown it open. Someone without the Force might not have noticed the reservations that ran all the way down to the core of him. But there was nothing two-faced about it; Poe was simply putting aside his personal feelings for the sake of getting shit done.

That deserved respect, and reciprocation.

He almost, _almost_ smirked back. "I thought you people would never ask."

** I-oOo-I**

That morning, the Resistance had relocated; too many people crammed into the already claustrophobic Millennium Falcon, while two grim-faced volunteers split from the group to waste valuable fuel flying his Upsilon shuttle in circles for a couple of hours before reconvening, just in case. The hide-out inside the mountain was even smaller than the last – _almost_ small enough to make their numbers look normal – but it was an actual base, with facilities to match.

The air behind the hermetically sealed-and-rusted hatches was almost overwhelmingly stale. No-one had set foot here since the end of the Empire. The bunker had been carved out of the base of a mountain, and was still mostly furnished. The Alliance had done that sporadically in bolt-holes all across the galaxy, his mother had explained before they left. After the Battle of Endor, the fight against the Empire had quickly moved out of the shadows and into the open, leading to a drastic shift in the kind and size of accommodations needed. Little places like this, far away from civilization, had become more trouble than they were worth. The Alliance would never have survived without an overabundance of caution, though, so some obsolete bases were preserved in an habitable state just in case.

"Keep a low profile for now," she'd also advised. "Until we have something for you to do with your power, don't needlessly remind people of how dangerous you can be."

While he lingered in the rear, 'guarded' by a tired Abednedo mechanic, he had observed in the Force how Rey had grown gradually more adept at and comfortable in her contribution: wrestling with doors and unsticking moving parts melded together by time beyond what physical measures alone could separate any longer.

By lunchtime, the mess hall had been up and running. Someone had gone out into the surrounding woodland with a chem-check tool to look for edible greens and game, and the storage room had yielded the standard single large crate of everlasting rations (stable-molecule nutrient mix: just add water), left behind by Rebels the galaxy over as a salute to the future, whatever it would turn out to be.

By dinnertime, the whole base smelled of the first hot meal the Resistance had had in days. It lifted everybody's spirits. The little mess hall was packed.

Good thing he had his impenetrable bubble of reviled-ness to clear the way for him, or he might never have reached the food. He loaded up two trays in no time at all, muttering a sarcastic _'thank you, so considerate'_ under his breath every time another person looked over their shoulder and promptly jumped out of the way.

Then Rey darted into his no man's land, and for the second time that day, the tray meant for his mother was snatched from his hands. Rey's eyes and body language were only half-playful, daring him to try and get it back and receive a taste of her very real teeth.

Sighing in irritation, he raised a hand and pulled a new tray toward himself with the Force, over the heads of the crowd.

Rey frowned. "Leia said not to do that."

"Mother said to bring her dinner," he shot back.

"Oh." She looked at the tray she'd taken. "That... makes more sense than what I thought you were doing. Sorry."

He shrugged and filled the new tray, before turning on his heel and heading back the way he came. The mess hall breathed a collective sigh of relief at his departure. In the Force, it tickled the back of his neck like a breeze.

Rey followed in his wake and declared: "I want you to teach me everything you know about the Force."

_Oh, _now_ you do?_ he thought, with a flash of bitterness so obviously past its 'last useful by' date even he had to take a moment to admire how unreasonable it was.

"After dinner."

Rey huffed. "What do you take me for? I was thinking tomorrow, or whenever Leia and Poe are done with you. But of course _after dinner_."

"What changed your mind?" he asked. Because nothing said 'reasonable' like wanting to hear her say 'you killed everyone else who could have taught me'.

But she looked at him as if the answer should be obvious. "You came back."

That stopped his mind in its tracks. Boosted his heart up into his throat.

_No._

Hadn't they already had this conversation? How could she look at him with such certainty when her answer was so obviously, strikingly wrong?

"Not for you," he said without thinking.

All he _could_ think when he tried, with something approaching panic, was: _She watched me run him through. She left me. She can't have forgotten that already. She wouldn't do that again. They _can't_ do that._

Rey's expression faltered. "I didn't say –"

"Not for the Light, either," he went on. "Not even for the good cause."

She raised an eyebrow. "Do you talk like this to everybody here? Because you're not making yourself sound like a very convincing defector."

Of course not. This was different. This thing between them was personal.

Far, far too personal.

"You and I both know what happened the last time I forced myself to put in more than I had to give."

"I thought you just agreed to teach me!" Rey burst out, yanking him to a stop with a hand fisted in his sleeve. Only an instinctive Force-freeze kept his mother's caf from spilling. "Why are you trying to discourage me now?"

She wouldn't even take the bait when he dangled it right in front of her. Or perhaps she simply didn't notice. A lightsaber to the throat would have been less disconcerting than this stubborn compartmentalization.

"I'm not. I just want you to understand what you're getting into. If that discourages you, maybe that should tell you something," he said.

Rey set her jaw, nostrils flaring. "Is that your excuse for being an arse? If you don't want to teach me, just say so."

"I want to teach you," he said, because that idea hadn't lost its shine even as all the reasons for it had turned to ash in his mouth. "But I know a rejection when I see one, and both of yours were perfectly clear."

"What, you're allowed to change your mind but I can't?"

_No, you can't,_ he thought with ruthless, double-edged petulance –

Like he was fourteen again, wrenching himself out of his mother's attempt at a last embrace and stomping off without looking back, because how dare she, _how could she_, telling him to go away and not come back until he'd gotten rid of all the parts she didn't like about him, until he wasn't _Ben_ anymore, and then trying to act like she still cared about the worrisome nuisance she was leaving behind. (And she hadn't run after him, had told him in the holo-call Uncle Luke soon made him sit down for that she understood it was hard for him and she wouldn't pressure him any more than she already had. But while his mother gave him his space, Snoke had wordlessly projected the sense of a fierce, unyielding hug until he stopped struggling and had to muffle his sobs in his sleeve, because what Snoke had understood even if Ben didn't was that _that_ was what he'd needed, _proof_ that it wasn't false comfort given only out of obligation, that he _wasn't_ so disposable to his parents that they were trying to trade him in for a better model like he was nothing but an ill-fitting coat.)

Like the fifteenth day after his fifteenth birthday, when a courier had unexpectedly arrived at the temple with a big, brightly wrapped box filled with presents his father was too busy chasing his pre-Rebellion glory days or some shit like that to give him himself, _'sorry kiddo, we'll catch up soon, alright?'_, and the sinking feeling in his gut had gotten so bad he felt like he was going to be sick. But instead of his stomach, it had been his head that turned inside out and erupted, and he'd locked himself in his cabin and torn and smashed everything his father had sent him apart – the priceless antique books and the leather jacket and the tiny hand-made pet droid and the bottle of liquor and _all of it_, and the box itself after that, and everything else in his cabin he could throw after that – and then he'd cried until morning, until he all but passed out from the splitting headache it gave him. (And he hadn't understood why it didn't make him feel better. Why he'd kept going even as regret clawed up his throat. Why he couldn't make the compulsion to tear at his hair and destroy every good thing he had left leave his hands. But while Uncle Luke worked himself into an unprecedented, despairing, screaming mess in the face of his nephew's hard-eyed silence and bruised hands and destruction the next morning, Snoke had only to brush the surface of his mind from star systems away to understand exactly why he was upset. He'd assured him that it wasn't his fault his deadbeat lowlife of a father apparently couldn't even feign affection anymore if he tried to buy his only son off with such material extravagance, and it was only natural for such strong emotion to need an outlet; that if there was no good use for him to put it to, any port had to do in a storm; that what was done was done, so there was no use feeling ashamed about it now. (And wasn't it awfully convenient for the Jedi code to place the burden of not feeling hurt and wronged on his shoulders, while his father's behavior was drowned in 'he didn't mean it like that's and 'but you know he loves you anyway, right?'s?))

Like when he was seventeen and a heavy-hearted Uncle Luke said his parents were on the holo and wanted to talk to him about something, and he caught _separation-justtryingit-liars-gonnadivorceatthisrate-heartbreak-homebreak-nowwhatdowedowithBen_ in his uncle's mind, and the devastation was so sharp and sudden he couldn't have done more than snap "don't bother, I got the message" if he'd wanted to – no, if he'd _admitted_ to wanting to, because he _did_. He hadn't lived with his parents, in their house, for more than a few weeks a year for years, but the urge to beg them not to take even that away from him, to please just reconsider, to come get him and turn back the clock and let him prove that he didn't need to be here to do better, to let him do something, _anything_, he would do whatever it took to fix what he'd done to break their family – it was almost unbearable. But they'd made the decision without him. If there was anything he could have said to make them change their minds, they didn't try very hard to hear it. They made up, eventually, yet more time apart exactly what the doctor ordered, but they never came to take him home together again. Eventually, they stopped coming for him at all. (And Snoke had waited, and waited, and waited, until even the things Ben still loved about the Jedi temple at his loneliest and most dejected, studying and training and losing himself in the Force until he forgot his own name, could no longer offset the feelings of desolate loss and being lost, and Ben had been the one to reach for _him_.)

_No,_ because he had given up everything to save her and she'd turned on him anyway, and by coming here he had traded away any time he might have had to lick his wounds about it to boot. (Because everything inside him quailed to realize how much power she had found over him in a matter of _days_. How easily she had lured Kylo Ren away from a loyalty that had taken Snoke the better part of Ben Solo's life to earn.)

And _no_ especially because he had an inkling what this was really all about, and he wasn't having it.

"Did you?" he asked, voice hard and eyes cutting. "Change your mind? Or do you think _I'm_ the one who's changed? You reject me when you think I'm acting like Kylo Ren, you approach me when you think I'm acting like Ben Solo. It's becoming a pattern. But what I have to teach you is no different now than it was on Starkiller."

For a moment her mouth hung slack from incredulity and indignation, before pulling tight with suppressed rage. "I need what you have, that's all. I have no expectations for you to live up to as a person any longer, I assure you."

"But you do. You know exactly what I am, but that's not how you were looking at me when you finally asked. You –"

"Oh, for the love of –"

"You keep doing this, Rey!"

One shout was enough to draw three blasters. He tucked that away for future reference. Rey snapped at her comrades to switch off and keep moving, while he stood there with his two dinner trays like an idiot and fumed until they obeyed.

He lowered his voice to a whisper harsh enough to match the glare she sent him. "First it was your parents, now you're holding onto a vision that was never real to begin with."

"No, shut up, you _coward_," she hissed. "You're just a miserable bastard who won't even try!"

"None of it was real. It wasn't fate, it wasn't the Force, Snoke was behind it all along."

"I don't believe that."

"You don't know what he was capable of. Mind games were his specialty. I never found a limit to what he could do."

"I don't _care!_" she cried out, and she let slip such a terrible yearning he almost wanted to believe her. Almost wanted to throw himself onto that sword again. "I didn't see anything that isn't possible, even now. _Especially_ now. All we have to do is _try_, Ben."

Almost.

But he'd been down this road so many times before. He could still see his own bloody footprints in the sand. This wasn't a pain he could transform into strength. This pain would only drain him until there was nothing left.

(Everything inside him quailed. She would take everything if he let her. And then she would leave and take it all with her, and the emptiness would kill him, slowly, like it had while he thought his mother was dead.)

So he gulped his foolish desires back down and choked out the words he needed to say.

"I'm done trying to do what you're asking of me. You were right the first time: I _am_ a monster. There's no coming back from the things I've done no matter how many Resistances I serve. You think you can overlook my crimes, but it won't last, Rey. You know it won't. Sooner or later it will start to eclipse whatever it is that makes you want to pretend you don't see the blood on my hands."

He had to pause to take a deep breath. Even before, he had never been good enough, and all he'd ever done was make himself less worthy. Having to spell it out to _her_ was like carving out his liver with a blunt knife. But he forged on. He had to. He always did.

"With the kind of expectations you're harboring, I _will_ fail you. And I'll keep failing, like I always have. Like I always will. Everybody realizes that in the end. It just takes time. And I'm sick of waiting for the other shoe to drop. I'm sick of losing against the inevitable."

"That's not true. You won't... _you won't_."

"It is and I will."

Tears spilled down her cheeks. He never quite seemed capable of shedding his own when he most wanted to anymore, had beaten the ability out of himself years ago. But Rey could still cry in abundance. Her mouth opened and closed, searching for words, but she looked like her heart was too broken to contradict him. To cling to wishful thinking. To deny the truth.

(_See?_ said a cruel, quiet voice inside. _Right again. Who would ever fight to keep _you?_ These people you care so much about, they'll never need you the way you need them. It's your greatest weakness, my boy. I've tried to warn you so many times. When will you finally listen?_)

"So you're just going to give up hope?" was all she said in the end, voice small and strangled.

Hope. _Hope._ His father had believed in skill and luck, both good and bad, and hope as something to spark bright when you needed it and kept tucked safely away when you didn't, lest you wore it out. His mother believed in hard work and hope above all else, a combination inextricably entwined with the stubbornness that made up the foundation of her being.

Ben Solo remembered hope as a receding tide, filling up his little body over and over again only to inevitably draw back and leave him hollowed out, until, by the time he wasn't so little anymore, it barely lapped his shins anymore and stung all the worse for it. Kylo Ren remembered hope as something to be stamped out, chaining him to his misery with its empty promises of impossible things and locking the galaxy in an eternal cycle of futile struggle with itself, which could only be broken by wiping the slate clean and starting from scratch. Hope was just a fancy word glorifying people's sunk cost and just world fallacies, a pretty term to make the wait for chaos and random chance to work out in your favor more bearable, a fight between fact and fiction, dream and reality, that would never see a winner or an end.

Hope was just one more beast that had been tearing him apart for as long as he could remember.

His eyes burned. "I'm sick to death of hope."

**II-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-I-oOo-I-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-II**

_**To Be Continued**_


	5. III - Language Barriers (I)

In which attempts are made.

**_III – Language Barriers_**

Stepping into his mother's quarters after that was like stumbling across the threshold into another universe. One where finally, at long last, at least one of the many faulty connections in his brain had clicked into place. One where somehow, miraculously, he didn't _always_ have to brace himself for things to go from bad to worse anymore.

"There you are," Mom laughed, turning in her seat as he entered, like a sun breaking through clouds. He breathed easier just from that. Even her discolored hair and the lines on her face and how short she seemed now that he'd grown into his own full height didn't feel so wrong when she smiled at him. "I was about to form a search party."

(He wasn't sure what made Rey and his mother so different, or how their roles had gotten so reversed from a week ago, or how his miraculous certainty had come to be, either time. He didn't dare dwell on any of it long enough to figure it out.)

She cocked her head and studied his face, his posture, as he set the trays down on her desk.

"Ben, what's wrong?"

"It's nothing," he mumbled.

"Don't give me that. What happened?"

_I love you,_ he thought, twice as fiercely and not half as terrified as anything he had dared to think about Rey. _I want them to put me down before you send me away again._

But he wasn't convinced that she _would_ cast him out before someone or something inevitably killed him. Wasn't that a wonder?

He pulled up his chair opposite her. "Rey and I had an argument. It's personal, please drop it."

"Alright," she said, still eyeing him. "If that's what you want."

"And don't go asking her about it either," he said, shooting his mother a glower.

She didn't have to ask what he meant by that. She snorted, looking less than impressed and more than a little amused. "You and I both know I couldn't have stopped Poe from talking my ear off if I tried. His mouth is his second-greatest weapon."

He averted his eyes and stuffed his face with soapy-tasting native beets.

She covered his free hand with hers and squeezed it. (His _bare_ hand, because sitting down to dinner with your outerwear still on was not how she had raised him. Every time she touched his bare hand or his bare face or his back or shoulders through his tunic was like a cascade of hot water over an ice sheet. Things he'd never noticed the existence of before snapped and crackled, little spasms of pain amidst a flush of joy.)

"Though it would be nice if _you_ would tell me more about what's happened to you since we parted, and I didn't have to rely on everyone else to fill me in," she said. "I didn't want to bring it up while everything was so busy and we might not have the time to talk about it properly, but..."

Ah. Great. Damn.

Staring unseeing at his plate, he took his time chewing and swallowing. Here was a dilemma he had faced about twenty times a day in the past week: when an opening to talk about one of the many horrific things that had happened in the past ten years presented itself, should he take the initiative in broaching the subject, or leave it up to his mother or whoever else it concerned to decide when and where they wanted to deal with it?

("Mom," he'd said at some point, maybe very late the first day, maybe halfway through the second; they'd been in hyperspace for hours, and it was hard to keep track of time when you didn't sleep. "About Dad."

_"No,"_ she'd said. And the look on her face, the shrieking outburst of icy knives in the Force where a heartbeat before his mother had been, had shut him up quickly and permanently.)

Well, she _was_ asking this time.

"I'm the reason Luke is dead," he said evenly. And there were moments, fleeting but all the more ferocious for having had to claw their way up through the green-lit fear that never seemed to end and a thousand other things tangling him up inside, when he felt really, really good about that. "I didn't think you'd want me disrespecting your brother's memory to your face too."

She took a long, deep, watery breath. (Another dilemma: give people the privacy to grieve freely, or face the pain he had caused head on and let it burn through his veins like his own, as he deserved?)

"Well, that's something, I suppose. In the interest of fairness, though, I don't believe the truth should ever be considered disrespectful," she said gruffly, and barked out a single, humorless laugh. "And in the spirit of honesty? I've been finding it hard to mourn losing Luke a second time ever since Rey finally coughed up the details of what 'confronting you about your darkness and completely messing it up' _really_ meant."

His head shot up. "He – ?"

"She had to beat the truth out of him with a lightsaber."

He wasn't sure whether he was surprised or not – at Luke _or_ Rey's actions – but it suddenly, belatedly, occurred to him, like a bowcaster to the chest, that his mother _hadn't_ spent the last ten years hating him; and that unlike what he'd kept telling himself over the years as he tried to make sense of what had happened, if his fall hadn't been a grimly satisfying confirmation of every ugly suspicion his parents had ever harbored about him, what Skywalker had told them about that night _would_ have made a difference.

"All this time, you thought..." The words wouldn't come.

That her son was the one who had attacked her brother out of nowhere, not the other way around.

That his disappearance had been motivated by calculated malice and gleeful retaliation.

That Ben had _left_, rather than fled.

But she'd kept loving him anyway.

(His father had arrived on Starkiller believing the worst of the incident, of them, of _everything_, and had stepped into arm's reach anyway.)

After all these years, all the things he'd done since, all the blood that _was_ on his hands, that one dark night shouldn't matter. But it did.

It _did_.

Leia's eyes burned as she watched his thoughts play out across his features.

"I thought Luke would never be able to hurt me more than he did when he abandoned me. I was wrong. I certainly didn't want him _dead_, but I would very much have appreciated a chance to punch his lights out. That's the part I've decided to hold against you, just so you know: that I'll never get to wail on him with a lightsaber myself."

The moment of grim humor was gone as quickly as it came; her mouth turned into a hard, tightly pressed line.

"Don't misunderstand my reasons for saying this, Ben. You – you know what you did. But I don't want that to be a wall between us. We've wanted you home and safe and back on our side for so long, and now you are. I'm not going to throw away every sacrifice it cost us just because the price was so high. You are my son and I love you. I will not condone or dismiss the things you've done, but I want our relationship to be as normal as possible in spite of them because I love you _no matter what_. Understand?"

He didn't think anyone else – anyone else _alive_ – would have noticed the effort it took to keep her voice from trembling.

His mouth was dry, his lips numb. "I love you too."

She nodded brusquely, as if to say 'of course you do', and looked away. Her hand tightened almost painfully around his.

"I lost my brother a long time ago. I learned to live with that loss a long time ago. But he didn't have to – the least he could have done was –" Closing her eyes, she let out a harsh breath. "I'm trying to be sympathetic to how hard it must have been for him. You were still a child when I sent you to him. I asked him to raise you, as well as teach you. And all those other Jedi, he'd known and worked with and taught them for years as well. He loses his senses for one moment, and then you're gone and they're dead. That's enough to break anyone a little. I understand, of course I do. He was a wreck the last time we spoke. I'd never seen him so undone. I keep catching myself wanting to think that maybe I'm making too much of what Luke did, that he didn't lie to your father and I quite so flagrantly, but –"

Suddenly she looked up, and she must have caught a glimpse of his expression before he could duck his head to hide behind the fall of his hair, because she quietly finished with:

"No, I thought not."

She tugged his hand towards herself and pressed a kiss to his knuckles.

"Sweetie, look at me, please."

He only succeeded in granting her request, he thought, because he had so much experience tormenting himself. Eyes unbearably soft and sorrowful, she wrapped both of her hands around his.

"I have _never_, for even a moment, wanted you to die, Ben. Neither did your father. We've only ever wanted you to be well. Safe. Happy. I don't care whether Luke would have gone through with it or not, you couldn't have known. Not without putting your life on the line, and that is not something anyone in this family should ever have asked of you. You defended yourself against your uncle that day. _As you should have._ And if I knew my brother at all – and I did – I know he would have agreed with us on that, once he came to his senses. What happened with the other students is a discussion for another time, but that you were so unsure of us, so scared of us... that's entirely our fault."

"Snoke helped," he blurted out before he could think better of it. A hot-and-cold rush of _something_ passed through him, but he reminded himself that Snoke was dead. Being less than grateful would no longer disappoint the man he went to such abominable lengths to please. Casting blame on his master would no longer bring down his wrath. He could say whatever he damn well wanted about the bastard.

(So what did it say about him that he _didn't_ want to?)

But his mother's eyes darkened. "We gave him too much to work with."

"No. It wasn't your fault," he insisted. "It was mine. Maybe it was Snoke's. But it wasn't yours."

She shook her head and opened her mouth.

He couldn't keep an accusatory note from his voice. "I love you no matter what too, you know!"

That only seemed to make her sadder. "Yes, I know."

"I'm sorry," he tried. "I didn't _want_ to hurt you. Not with any of it."

"I know. Neither did we. But it happened anyway. We let Snoke –"

He couldn't keep looking at her; squeezed his eyes shut. "Mom, please stop."

"No. It's about time I told you –"

"I love you."

"I know."

"I'm sorry, I'll do better, I'll –"

"I _know_."

He opened his eyes but pulled his hands away. "_So stop!_"

The last time she looked at him with this blend of apology and determination was when they'd decided he was going to Luke's and it wasn't a question anymore. "I can't do that, Ben. I need to –"

"You don't need to do anything, I'm the one who ended up killing _him!_"

She stared at him, stunned. He stared back, a little stunned himself. Then he felt her swatting that fact away like a fly, and went from 'a little stunned' to 'absolutely floored'. And here he'd thought _Rey_ was a stubborn compartmentalizer.

"_And?_" his mother asked peevishly. "You're not listening, Ben. I'm trying to tell you something here."

_But what about what _I'm_ trying to tell _you? he thought.

_(And what about _Dad?_)_

But he had lost the right to say that to her. She had asked him to talk about it; now she was telling him to stop. So he would stop talking, end of discussion. Enough excuses. Submit and face the consequences of your failure.

"Yes, you've done things that by all rights I should never forgive you for, but I _do_, and I love you. Han and I both did. If you feel so guilty about what you've done that you can't shut up about it –" He startled. "– then frankly I'm relieved, because I've spent a lot of the past ten years wondering how you could possibly have gotten yourself turned around so badly." Her expression crumpled. "But you thought we wanted you _dead_, Ben."

Lowering his eyes, he told himself that things would be better after this. He would come out of this stronger and be less of a disappointment in the future. "I'm sorry. I should never have doubted you. I failed you."

"_No_, Ben, _we're_ sorry. We failed you first. Good parents don't raise their children to think they won't be safe with them when their life is at stake." He sensed the sorrowful shake of her head without having to see it. "We weren't ready."

"Accidents happen," he mumbled. "I know. It's fine."

"Ben, look at me."

He obeyed. By necessity and through training, he was definitely not the dissociative type. Removing yourself from your pain meant removing yourself from the power of the Dark Side. Once you started down that path, you might as well go crawling back to the Jedi and beg them to turn you into a serenely empty husk.

Even so, the emotion on his mother's face didn't seem quite real to him.

"You were the happiest accident your father and I ever had. How many times do I have to tell you that?"

"You didn't have to tell me the first time. I understand. I don't blame you." (_Anymore._)

"Oh, I wish you'd never heard that."

_(I heard a lot of things you and Dad didn't want me to know you were saying about me,_ he thought.)

She rubbed her forehead and rested her head in her hand, staring unseeing down at the table. "Truth is, we might never have been ready. We barely managed to take care of each other, let alone someone so tiny and vulnerable and completely dependent on us. But we loved you so much, from the moment we first learned of your existence, we thought that alone would be enough. That twenty years of successful parenting and protecting you from people like _him_ would magically fall into our laps just because we were heroes and we cherished you so very, very much."

Ah, _there_ the clench and twist in his chest was.

"If you loved me so much, why are you trying to use it against me?" he couldn't help but ask.

She looked up at him from beneath her brow, her eyes heavy and old and sad. "Is that what you think I'm doing?"

"I don't know. I don't understand any of this."

Straightening, she grabbed his hands. "I'm doing what I think I have to to both get what I want and give you what you need. Can you accept that premise?"

After a moment of hesitation, he nodded.

After a considerably longer moment of hesitation, she said: "Tell me. Do you think your father and I are responsible for your fall to the Dark Side and the things you did under the First Order?"

"What?" he blurted out. "Of course not. Why would I?"

For all that he had been a needy, resentful brat about his unmet yearning for them, for all that it had taken barely a breath of a suggestion from Snoke to start mining that pain and bitterness for power, he had always known deep down that it wasn't his parents' fault he was the way he was. If anything, the chain of cause and effect was the other way around. He had been a Dark stain born into a nest of Light, and that was what had put his parents off.

The Force had claimed him before he even manifested in his mother's womb. His had been the strongest sensitivity, the greatest permeability, a living creature had shown to it since the death of his grandfather. Snoke used to say it was his grandfather's thwarted destiny as the prophesied Chosen One, the restorer of balance, looking for another vessel to fulfill it. A new champion of the Force that would usher in a thousand-year Empire under the Dark Side, to balance out the millennium of Light Side rule that had been the Galactic Republic. And who more fit to that task than Vader's very own grandson?

The Force abhorred absolutes and extremes, Snoke had explained. The Jedi Order had dominated the galaxy too completely for too long. A sea change was inevitable, and ought not to be denied. It was their duty to give the galaxy what it needed, to help it turn over a new leaf and snuff out the resistance that would inevitably be put up by those raised glutted on the Light. Perhaps there would _always_ be resistance. Certainly, just as the Sith had endured for centuries, two-by-two, careful and tenacious, Force-strong adherents to the Light would keep trying to wrest back the absolute control they had grown accustomed to, because even in this time of desperate need for the Dark, the Force would not quietly abide absolutes. But that was nothing to despair about. They should guard themselves against letting the persistence of their opposites and adversaries cause doubt in their own hearts. Their enemies would only ensure they remained in fighting shape, keep them on their toes. In the end, the Force would be on their side and prove them right. Their time had come. They need only rise up to claim it.

And his devotion to the wisdom of Snoke's words may have begun to wane since Kylo Ren had let go of his death-grip _need_ to believe them in favor of catching Rey before she fell _(like his father)_, but there were truths in what his master had taught him that even now could not be denied.

He had been meant for the Dark Side from the beginning. The most he could blame his parents for was trying so hard and so long to keep him in the Light and only getting him stuck between the two as a result, forever at odds with himself. But he had indulged too much in his long-suppressed love for them recently to even do that.

"Well, I'm not going to let you go around blaming yourself for being unlovable when _we_ were the ones responsible for making you feel that way, either," his mother said.

"But – you're not," he said, frowning. "I know I'm not..." He had to force the word out. "...unlovable. I'm just hard to love by people like you and Dad."

(And Rey. Perhaps _especially_ Rey, because she didn't even have a biological compulsion to trick her into wanting to try over and over again.)

His mother's mouth fell open, her eyebrows scrunching together in indignation. "What is that supposed to mean?!"

He had been born with shadows threaded through his soul, growing slowly and quietly at first and with greater and more violent leaps and bounds the older he got, the call of the Dark Side always growing stronger. It wasn't the fault of his Light-pure parents that they were repulsed by Ben's ever-expanding storm clouds like he and they were opposite ends of a pair of magnets. It was the way of the world. The nature of the Force.

"I know you do love me. I don't doubt that. It's just..." Shrugging awkwardly, he patted her hands, looking for a diplomatic way to phrase it. "It happens. You were too Light and I was too Dark. The two don't coexist easily."

Tears sprang to her eyes. She covered her mouth with her hand to muffle the sharp breath of a sob.

He promptly panicked. "Mom, please don't cry. I'm sorry, I'll shut up."

"It's not your fault, Ben," she said thickly, eyes shut tight, free hand squeezing his. "I'm crying because it took me this long to realize how horribly we failed you."

"_Mom,_" he pleaded. "Please stop doing this to yourself. I love you no matter what. I don't want to hear this."

"I could say the same to you."

"No you can't," he tried one last time. He kept his voice as reasonable as he could manage when his heart beat so frantically. "I have too much of your people's blood on my hands."

She looked despondent. "But this predates any of your crimes, doesn't it? I didn't see it then, but I do now. Just like Luke thinking he had to kill you predated you actually _doing_ anything. Just like I treated normal childish acting out like it meant you could turn into my Sith father any minute. Our heads were so full of ghosts from the past they started looking like visions of the future, and you paid the price. But all that time, the real reason you became so angry and standoffish was because you thought we didn't love you. Didn't you?"

He swallowed down a hundred things that would have meant 'yes'. This was not the time and place for 'yes'. It might never be again. 'Yes' was a thing of the Dark Side that did not belong in his mother's presence. So he shoved it back into the box he had built for it as a boy and vowed that this time, he would do a better job of locking it away.

"I'm sure it's easier to love a child who doesn't resort to cold-blooded murder as a result," he said quietly instead –

– and his mother froze.

A slow-swelling rage glowed behind his eyes, and for once it was not his own. He opened his mouth to take it back, to assure her again that he didn't doubt her, not anymore, that he didn't think he ever could again, but she beat him to speaking.

"Snoke told you that."

He frowned, confused.

"I heard him in the Force just now," she said, her eyes searching perhaps his face, perhaps the universe at large. There was a dangerous edge to her voice. "Like an echo. You spoke the words, but they came from his mouth, in his voice. Like the first time they were said."

She was seething now. This was the kind of fury he had expected to be greeted with for years, and even though he knew it wasn't directed at him, it made his spine straighten and his fists clench nonetheless.

"Snoke had _the Force-forsaken nerve_ to tell you that, after _he_ manipulated you into doing it!"

He swallowed thickly. "He was only telling the truth."

"No he wasn't, Ben. He was using a _half_-truth to sell you a fucking _lie_. Or were you just making things up when you talked to Poe about that night at Luke's temple? No? And you're here now, aren't you?" Her eyes burned with water and fire both. "I still love you ten years of fighting for the enemy later, don't I?"

"You call this easy?"

Pain traveled down his throat and made his jaw and his voice shake. But his mother turned soft. The sparking core of rage mellowed, warmed, until it was a blanket of stubborn affection wrapped tight enough around them both to press their hearts together and ease something of the lance of guilt and grief and loss and regret that was all that united them across a decade of separation.

"Yes," she said, cupping his jaw right where the tension-ache drilled into bone. She pressed her warm thumb into the focal point, and the pain melted away. "Yes, sweetheart. Loving you is the easiest thing I've ever done. Just as it always has been."

"Yeah," he breathed wonderingly. "For me too."

**II-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-I-oOo-I-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-II**

_**To Be Continued**_


	6. III - Language Barriers (II)

She asked him for a hug. He let her have her hug until it calmed her down, and his muscles relaxed and his nerves unwound enough to make it tolerable, and long after.

"There's no turning back time, or bringing back the dead. There's no fixing that," she murmured into his tunic, rubbing her hand up and down his back. "But we can still make a difference in this war, together. And as long as we're alive, as long as the two of us are still here, we can mend _us_. Alright?"

"Alright."

As long as either of them was still alive, he would like that. For her, he could do that.

Maybe it was the primal bond they had shared while she was pregnant with him, maybe it was getting her back from the dead, but somehow, it was _different_ with his mother. If and when she was forced to denounce or let him go again, one last and final time, it wouldn't be because he had failed yet again. It would mean he had succeeded in destroying that which Snoke had always urged him to destroy. It would be a fair death. They could come for him in his sleep again for all he cared; at least this time, it would be a death he had _earned_.

Funny how much of a difference that made.

And he had gotten this time with Mom before the end, almost without _having_ to earn it. It really was a wonder.

Smelling soap and gravy, he said: "I'm not hungry anymore."

She laughed hoarsely and let him go with a last pat on the back. "Me neither. My stomach's all in knots. Let's give it an hour. We'll stick with a glass of water for now. Oh –" she added, picking up a datapad and returning to the chair she had vacated to hug him, while he fetched them both water. "– and I need you to pick a color."

"What for?"

"Some shirts. I'm adding a set of uniforms and a new wardrobe for you to the grocery list along with everything else. Not that we're in a position to go shopping just yet, but I like to be prepared."

He frowned and leaned over her shoulder to read along. "What's wrong with what I'm wearing now?"

"It looks very _Kylo Ren_, honey. Let's try not to make that any harder on everyone than we have to," she said mildly.

He felt oddly beleaguered. "Fine. Red."

She groaned. "Nooooo."

"What?"

"Now I owe Ematt five credits!" She tapped a note into the datapad and shot a mock-affronted look up at him. "I thought you liked dark green!"

"You bet on me?" It took him a moment to remember if what she said was true. It had been so long since he'd worn anything but solid black. "Not to the exclusion of everything else."

She heaved a theatrical sigh.

"I don't think I could pull off green anymore with my complexion, anyway. I've barely seen natural light for ten years. People wouldn't be avoiding me because I'm a Darksider, but because I'd look like I could throw up on them at the slightest provocation," he pointed out dryly.

Her mouth pulled into a crooked smile. "You might be right."

He drained his glass, set it aside, and without giving himself time to reconsider, lowered himself to the ground to lean against his mother's shoulder. Let him be the clingy little boy he was deep down, at a depth no trace of dignity or maturity had ever penetrated. General Organa wanted to be his mother again. He would never be the son she had always wanted, but he could try to be _a_ son, as best as he knew how. Even if it tempted him to lower himself like this.

Turning slightly in her seat, she reached out to brush a lock of hair from his face. "Is the floor that comfortable?"

"Not really. You just got very short. I'd have to bend in half otherwise."

She chuckled and started stroking his hair. "I saved all my growth spurts to pass on to you."

Slow, warm, gentle drags of her hand. Force, how he'd missed this. How _she_ had missed this. No wonder she'd rather ignore anything that might get in the way of this feeling.

"I'm going to help Rey learn the ways of the Force," he said, letting his eyelids drift down.

"Really? I thought you two had a fight."

"That was _after_ she asked me to teach her. She didn't take it back." He shrugged. "We'll work something out. It shouldn't be too difficult. I'll try to be polite and patient, and she's a fast learner, so I don't think she'll be relying on me more than she's comfortable with."

"That's great, Ben." He could hear a smile in his mother's voice. "That'll be a real help."

"And I promise I won't hurt her," he added.

His mother's hand stilled. She turned her body toward him, and said cautiously: "That's an odd thing to specify."

Following her shifting warmth, he pressed his face into her shoulder. (Mom was real and here and she was letting him. A shiver ran down his spine.)

"I can't teach her about the Force without touching on the Dark Side. It's there and it will never go away," he said, aiming for reasonable. "The only way for a light not to cast any shadows is for it to shine into an empty void where it never touches anything. Rey will have to find a place for it in her life, good uses to –"

This time, he was the one who heard the echo of Snoke's words in his own.

"– to put it to," he finished firmly, once again watching the blue blade ignite and cleave the man in half. He wouldn't be Snoke. He had already decided that in the throne room. And there was no reason for Rey to be the next Kylo Ren. None whatsoever, least of all the _last_ Kylo Ren. So he went on: "And ways to turn away from it that won't just make it come back stronger later. We can't ignore it, but she doesn't want to devote herself to the Dark Side, and I won't make her. I don't _want_ to hurt her."

He wasn't sure how to do that yet, but he'd figure it out. He'd always been better at thinking on his feet than planning ahead.

His mother cupped her hand around the back of his head, leaned in close, and asked quietly: "Did Snoke hurt you a lot, Ben?"

It almost made him laugh.

"Of course. You don't get to be strong with the Dark Side without sufficient opportunity to hone your suffering to an art form."

As her presence in the Force blazed bright and hot with protectiveness and love and _'no, mine, no more, _mine_, my baby'_, she pulled him tightly to her and pressed a hard kiss to his crown. "I'm sorry about your mastery of the Dark Side then, but I don't want you suffering any more."

And _that_ almost made him smile.

"No promises. But I'll try to keep it to a minimum."

** I-oOo-I**

He knocked on Rey's door.

(_"Make sure to apologize first,"_ Mom had said. _"From the state of you, that argument you had seemed serious."_

He had replied with a huffy _"I can mediate my own fights, Mother,"_ because he wasn't twelve anymore, and 'the state of him'? Ugh.

_"Oh good, so you_ are _going to apologize,"_ she'd said in a pointedly sardonic tone of voice. _"You figured out not to do what your father and I did before we did."_

He had only frowned harder. He felt bad about making Rey cry, but there was nothing to apologize for. They disagreed on an emotionally charged subject, that was all. What was she gonna do, electrocute him? (She wasn't _Snoke_.))

Rey opened the door and stared. "What are you doing here?"

"I promised to teach you after dinner."

Rey stared harder. "And then we fought."

"That's no reason not to heed a summons," he said.

Maybe comparing Rey to Snoke had been a bad idea. Unbidden, he remembered limping out of Snoke's audience chamber and learning to walk back in without a hitch in his step. He tucked the thought away immediately. Hopefully she hadn't caught it. He'd known good manners _before_ Snoke, too. Probably better, if he was honest with himself. He was woefully out of practice.

Rey's mouth fell open. "There wasn't a – I didn't – you made me cry!"

"Yes," he acknowledged, inclining his head. "Regrettably. But I hope that now that we've gotten that unpleasantness out of the way, we can be civil to each other."

She stared at him for several more moments before closing her eyes and pinching the bridge of her nose. Then she stared at him with renewed intensity only to end up shaking her head.

"You know what, I'm not socially adept enough to decipher your mixed signals. Go away. I'll find you when I feel like talking to you again."

And she _whooshed_ the door in his face.

Now it was his turn to stare. Mixed signals? "What mixed signals? Rey?"

Nothing.

"I'm sorry?" he tried belatedly.

But all she had to say to him anymore was a muffled, "Switch off, Ben, I'm going to bed."

** I-oOo-I**

He slept in an empty janitorial closet adjacent to his mother's officer's quarters. It had been his own suggestion, knowing that without a door that locked and sturdy walls between himself and everybody else, he would not be getting a wink of sleep for the duration of the Resistance's stay at this base. With most of the shelves removed, the closet gave him just enough room to throw himself off of the narrow bed in case of an attack. When he folded the bed up and placed it against the wall, he could do stationary exercises. The base was so small it had no training room or spare spaces to improvise one, and he wasn't allowed outside where everybody else went for their daily drills. The lack of _real_ exercise was very slowly driving him up the walls, but what he did do would have to suffice. He wasn't going to resort to running laps through the hallways, to be gawked and glared at like an unusually unpopular sideshow freak.

It was smaller than an actual cell would have been, which satisfied a petty little part of the Resistance's collective hatred of him while affecting him hardly at all, because he spent most of his waking hours with his mother, the next room over. But it kept him from having to impose his presence on the barracks where almost everyone else slept, or taking up one of the few other single rooms, which the Resistance did not think he deserved.

It also ensured he did not spend too much time with his mother without supervision by self-appointed actual guards, the participants of her endless meetings, or streams of people reporting on or querying about one thing or another. The Resistance, in their absolute, Force-blind ignorance, worried about giving him the opportunity to exert a sinister supernatural influence over their general while she was vulnerable. The idea that such paltry obstacles could keep a Force-sensitive from messing with others' minds was bitterly laughable, but the opposite, at least, was true; him sleeping within shouting distance of his own mother strongly discouraged impulsive acts of violence against him.

At the end of the day, everybody went to bed as close to happy as they'd get.

That he slept poorly regardless was nothing new.

That night, he dreamt he stood at the bottom of the ramp of a ship. He was very small, and the light shining from the ship's open hatch very far away.

_Mom?_ He turned, round and round, but she was nowhere to be seen. _Mom?_

He turned back to the ramp. It was steep and the metal slippery, but on his hands and knees, he started to climb. He climbed, slid down, climbed, and slid down. He took hold of a barely-there ridge and pulled himself up, bracing his knees against it, and reached a little further up towards the light and warmth and shelter.

_Mom? Dad? _

They were inside, preparing for the journey. He was supposed to get inside, though he did not know where they were going.

_None of that, Kylo Ren,_ Snoke's voice came from behind.

He slipped down the ramp, and Snoke took his arm and pulled him to his feet.

_I want my Mom and Dad,_ he whined.

_This place is not for you,_ Snoke said, and dragged him away like he weighed nothing. _Come with me. It is time for your real life to start._

They left the ship hangar and traveled down a dim, dark corridor. Light shone in through doorways lining the walls ahead, but all the doors slammed shut before they could get there. He wandered from side to side and reached his little hand toward the door panels, though Snoke's gravity always swayed them back into the middle of the hallway.

This wasn't where he'd meant to go, he realized hazily. He was supposed to be climbing into the Falcon. It would leave without him if he didn't make it. But now he was supposed to come with Snoke too, though he did not know where they were going.

He whined like a Wookiee, all miserable frustration and indecision.

"Ben."

They stopped, and he looked around. Luke was here. Luke made his way slowly toward them.

"Hey, kiddo. Long time no see," Luke said.

He stared, uncomprehending. Something felt wrong.

"Can you step away from Mister Snoke for me, Ben?"

After a futile attempt at thinking about it, he shook his head, pressing himself back into Snoke's legs. Something bad would happen if... if...

Luke nodded. "Okay. That's fine. Mister Snoke, will you give Ben to me, please?"

Ben sucked in a breath.

_No,_ Snoke said – and his clawed fingers shot out and buried themselves into Ben's thin throat.

_Hurk!_ came wetly from Ben's mouth as Snoke lifted him into the air. Blood spilled over his lips. He could taste it, smell it. He could feel the pain and pressure of thick-tipped nails slicing into his flesh. He scrabbled at his throat, and it was like trying to fight air.

"_Ben!_" Luke yelled.

No, buzzed. The buzz of a lightsaber igniting, green and terrible. The blade _zoom_-ed through the air and crackled as it made contact with something solid above Ben, and then Snoke's head sailed by and hit the ground – a dull _thud_ – and rolled away into nothing.

Ben dropped into the pile of Snoke's golden robes, suddenly empty of Snoke himself.

"Hey, c'mere, let me look at you," Luke said, crouching over him where he lay. "Oh, you're fine. It's already gone. Whew. That looked way too realistic, kiddo."

Lying down. Uncle Luke. Lightsaber.

Something clicked.

Ben screamed.

"Oh, shoot," Luke said, following Ben's eyes. The green light in Luke's hand went out.

Other green lights came to life in the walls all around them.

Sobbing, Ben scrambled backwards, away from his uncle. But Snoke's robes tangled around his limbs, kept him in place.

"Ben, kiddo, hey, it's alright." Luke lifted him from the mass of fabric and folded Ben into his chest. "I'm not gonna hurt you, I promise. Hey, shhh, shhh, come on kiddo."

But Ben pushed and kicked and struggled and screamed and sobbed, panic filling his little body from tip to toe. _No, no, no, don't hurt me, please, lemme go, lemme go, Mom Dad help me –_

"So much fear," Luke breathed.

He let go. Ben stumbled backwards. His uncle's eyes were wet, and regret was etched in every line of his face.

Everything was blurry through the tears except Luke, who was clearer than the walls and his own little arms and legs and everything else combined. Reality warped and twisted around him, like he fundamentally did not belong in this world. Like he was so powerful the rules of the Force simply didn't apply to him anymore, and he could unmake the universe at a whim and remake it without any boys like Ben in it.

(With a single, dark thought he _had_ remade the universe to no longer have Ben in it.)

"I'm sorry, Ben." Ben backed away and landed in the pile of robes again, and Luke kept talking, his words as incomprehensible as a roaring ocean. "I guess it's still too soon. I know it must be hard to hear right now, but I really am sorry. I hope you can believe that someday."

He thought please don't hurt me I'm sorry I'll be good I didn't do anything Master please come back, and he crawled and stumbled away from the green light burning all around him across a floor that kept slipping out from underneath him and he wailed _Mama, Daddy, help me, where are you!_

_What's the matter, big guy?_ asked Dad. He crouched down and opened his arms, and Ben cried out and ran to him.

But Dad was all wrong. He looked too old and grey and tired, and there was a hole – a fresh, gaping, brightly-smoldering hole – there – there was a hole in his chest – there was a hole in his chest where Ben had –

"Dad, no!" cried Kylo Ren –

– and he jolted awake.

Sucking in a keening breath, he cast his awareness out into the Force and his hand for a hilt he barely realizes doesn't come. Rey and his mother asleep in their beds. The Force-numb minds of the Resistance, working or resting. Non-sentient creatures in all shapes and sizes in the surrounding woods. The diffuse glow of vegetation.

No Luke.

Of course no Luke.

_Luke is dead,_ he told his racing heart. _You felt it. Everybody felt it. He's dead, Snoke's dead, and not even the Force can keep the dead on equal footing with the living. He is no danger to you. He's_ not.

His heart, as usual, refused to listen.

_'Strike me down in anger and I will always be with you.' _

No.

_'If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.' _

No!

He rolled over in the dark and dug his nails into his palms until the shaking stopped, trying not to think about the hole in his father's chest.

(And failing.)


	7. IV - One Maze Or Another (I)

_"At the time of the Galactic Civil War, the Unknown Regions was regarded as an unexplored region that was separated from the galaxy by a labyrinth of solar storms, rogue magnetospheres, black holes, gravity wells, and things far stranger. Strange creatures were known to inhabit the void. This maze was considered impassable and many exploration ships and probe droids were lost trying to breach it. By the time of the Battle of Jakku, Imperial computers at the Jakku Observatory had found a safe route through this maze which involved taking multiple short hyperspace jumps through the maze. This journey took several months._

_Following the signing of the Galactic Concordance which ended the Galactic Civil War and dissolved the Old Empire, the Imperial remnants retreated from the known galaxy and relocated to the Unknown Regions. There, they established a militaristic remnant faction that became known as the First Order."_

_ – _Wookieepedia: The Unknown_Regions

_**IV - One Maze Or Another**_

The first and only command of any consequence given by Supreme Leader Kylo Ren had been to let loose the First Order's latest communications technology on their newly gained access to the New Republic's resources – communication nodes, broadcasting points, signal amplification stations, even, to some extent, the wide variety of satellites and holonet receivers owned by various planets – in order to cast a galaxy-wide net that would detect any transmissions originating from the Millennium Falcon. Over the decades, the Falcon had been modified so extensively and continuously that philosophers might argue it was a completely different ship now than it had been ten years ago, which was a completely different ship than it had been ten years before that, and so on. Significantly, every Identity Friend or Foe transponder ever installed had been tampered with, allowing the Falcon to assume any identity it could fabricate ID data for. But the IFF transponder relayed its message through the same communications array that had been in place since Ben Solo was a boy. This had never posed a security risk before, because no technology had ever existed before that could identify a ship by the effects the physical components of a communications array had on its broadcasts.

It existed now.

The technology had proved as smashing a success as hyperspace tracking had been. A courtesy IFF confirmation to a passing convoy of commercial transports had revealed the Falcon's exact location within hours of implementation. The doggedly grudge-bearing admiral who had provided the necessary sample of broadcasting data – a message from the Falcon to the command transport she'd piloted as a private in the Battle of Endor – had been promoted on the spot. The Resistance had barely escaped, and the Falcon had been forced to maintain absolute radio silence since. But they hadn't figured that out until they'd used up most of their fuel running from subsequent discovery to potential ally to discovery to ally, a Star Destroyer appearing in their wake every time they tried to hail anyone or anything.

When he gave the order, he hadn't particularly cared if it worked. He hadn't cared about much of anything; forming useful, productive, coherent thoughts had been difficult. He'd just known that he had to give Snoke's – now his – high command _something_ if he wanted to be taken seriously and not wake up to a blasting squad lined up around his bed.

He'd made that bed, and now he had to lie in it.

**I-oOo-I**

He pointed out a red dot in the star chart.

"Of the hidden supply stations spread along the Core-facing edges of the Unknown Regions, this one is easily the least heavily defended. It relies on the unique features of the surrounding terrain to conceal itself, and it doesn't waste extra resources to accomplish what's already a given. Luckily for us, it's also located within a reasonable distance from here."

He enlarged the dot and pulled up the local astronomical readings.

"It's located at the center of a complex gravitational snarl that prevents communications from passing through and distorts observational readings, both ways, to the point of uselessness. The density of spatial anomalies is unusual this far into the Outer Rim, so it's a low-traffic area the maps urge to avoid. Any ship unfortunate enough to be sucked into the gravity rapids surrounding the station runs straight into automated defensive fire. The safe lanes are narrow and winding. Safe flying and approach means knowing the route in advance."

"Which, thanks to the data you brought with you, I assume we do," General Organa said.

"Yes, we do."

He switched out the gravitational readings for station capacity data.

"First Order traffic in the area has picked up lately. Odds are there will be one or more freighters docked at the station at all times. Fuel, munitions, food, and other supplies will be no problem to carry away, and more ships will increase our manoeuverability and chances of survival by spreading out our numbers over multiple transports. Starship carriers are a different story. The only vessels big enough would be fully staffed, active-duty battleships there to resupply."

"We're not doing that," the General interrupted. "Not in the state we're in."

"Agreed," he said. "We don't have the numbers to take on something that size. Nevertheless, the whole point of this was to get our hands on fuel and TIE fighters. We'd just have to accept the limitation of having nowhere to dock the fighters off-planet."

"Fine by me," the General said. "Do they still not come equipped with hyperdrives?"

"No. When you're a military with numbers to match and not a militia that needs to scatter and reassemble across untold distances, the advantages don't cover the costs. But there will be spare drives at the station we can use to modify them."

"Good enough. Now tell me where the complications come in."

Poe leaned forward, elbows on the holotable. "The place is supposed to be _really_ sparsely manned. Skeleton crew, essentially. Loading and unloading is done by droids, and all that."

"'Supposed to'?"

"Surely I'm allowed a little skepticism when I'm putting my life in the hands of our greatest enemy."

"Formerly our greatest enemy, but fair enough. Go on."

"I'm a damn good pilot, you know that. With the intel, the Upsilon, and me taking point, I'm confident we can cripple the station, do our thing, and fly away with goods to spare. _But_, First Order protocol is to self-destruct before letting themselves be raided. They'll transmit a datapulse with all the information they've gathered about their attackers, and then blow themselves to smithereens."

"I thought the gravitational snarl made communication impossible?"

"It does – with the exception of parts of the safe lanes, which are equipped with a network of short-range relays to carry messages in and out," Poe said.

"We can't slice them, the station would notice."

"Very well," the General said. "Continue."

"Long story short, we don't want to give them any more time to prepare for us than we have to. Every second counts. They'll take us down with them if they can, and reinforcements will arrive to investigate either way. So if we're not quick and accurate enough in blowing up control and communications and other key points, the First Order will know we were there, and what our current goal is. Meanwhile, we are, best case scenario, trapped in a time-consuming gravity maze that delays our opportunity to hit hyperspace out of there." He shook his head. "I'm a _damn_ good pilot, but with the state the Resistance is in, I don't like that margin of error."

"Me neither," General Organa sighed. She crossed her arms and looked from Poe to him and back. "Our movements are limited enough as is – that's why I'm willing to consider this kind of stunt in the first place. We can't bring the First Order down right on top of us _again_. And I don't have to tell you how few trips we've got left in the tank, even with the Upsilon. I trust your skills, Poe, but I'm not sure that's enough to make this a _good_ option."

Poe shot him a look. "You said you might have something. Out with it already."

He took a deep breath through his nose. His blood buzzed with restless energy. "I have a trump card. But I'm not sure we should use it."

The General's eyebrows rose. "Oh?"

"One of my duties as Kylo Ren was assisting the Internal Security Bureau." He clasped his hands in front of him and fixed his eyes on the holographic map. "No better interrogator than a mind reader. Either to extract secrets from an enemy or to evaluate the loyalty of your own troops."

Poe's presence beside him turned to ice and steel; that wasn't what he'd been expecting. Not the time or place, though, so he ignored it.

"Can't mind-read code, but that was also part of the job. To that end, I was given special override codes for First Order computer systems. _Any and all_ computer systems. Giving me unlimited control and access. As soon as I get within range of a First Order system, I can lock everyone else out of it and everything it's actively connected to at the time."

He looked up, caught their eyes, and watched their jaws sag as that sank in.

"Why would we not use that?!" Poe exclaimed. "What – why would we not fly up to a dreadnought _right now_ and use it?"

"Because they're single-use, I have only three of them left, and presently there is no way for me to generate more."

The General leaned in, eyes keen and intent. "Elaborate."

He didn't have to be told twice.

"These codes gave me an enormous amount of power over the First Order. No general, admiral, or even the director of the Bureau, has anything like it. So obviously Snoke had ways to keep me from turning the power he gave me against him. The only thing my codes don't override are things encrypted by Snoke himself. His private system is alerted whenever I use one, and he can – could – cancel and undo anything I did in a matter of seconds. They can only be used once, I only get four at a time, and one of those four is needed to generate the next batch. The device that generates them is kept in one of his private vaults, secured by a system I can't override." He rotated some tension out of his jaw. "And I had no way to hide my thoughts and intentions from him. So trying anything was pointless to start with."

"Who has control of Snoke's private system now?" his mother asked, her voice quieter and softer than perhaps appropriate for the topic at hand. No doubt she would have personal questions when this was over and Poe was gone.

For now, he ignored it.

"I should note that there is a slight possibility Snoke had a failsafe in place to ensure my codes have become worthless now that he's dead. He probably didn't – booby-traps were more his style than outright salting the earth – but it's not completely impossible."

They nodded.

"That said, probably nobody. I couldn't get in. I didn't inherit access. Nobody did. Hux or whoever has taken my place could try to slice into it, but it's protected by the Force as much as it is by programming. They would get nowhere without me."

"But what about your Knights of Ren?" Poe asked. "Last you told me, weren't they Force users too?"

He had to take a moment to stare, first at Poe, then at his mother. "Are you really this badly informed?"

"The inner workings of the First Order have always been a frustratingly effective enigma," she said. "Why?"

"There are no Knights of Ren. They've been dead for years. Snoke and I were the only ones left."

His title of Master of them was at best a reminder. At worst, a mockery. He didn't say that out loud, but the soft _"Ah,"_ that slipped from his mother's mouth dipped low with silent understanding nonetheless.

Poe, meanwhile, looked pleasantly surprised. "Huh. Well, that makes things simpler for us. What killed them?"

"Their own weakness, Snoke, and me. It's not important, we're getting off track," he snapped. "The point is, we're in dire straits now, yes, and a full tank and a handful of starfighters could be the difference between the Resistance getting back on its feet, or no survivors the next time the First Order finds us. But I already used up one of my last batch of codes to copy the data I gave you and get away unnoticed, and I am not yet convinced the others should be used for anything less tide-turning."

"You haven't turned any tides yet, buddy," Poe drawled.

"Fine, _potentially_ tide-turning," he snarled back.

"No pissing contests where I have to listen to them, you two," the General warned. "Ben has a point. These codes, if they work – _continue_ to work, I mean, no need to give me that look – could be our Death Star. Unsavory as that analogy is, now that I've said it out loud. But either way, we shouldn't rush into using them. I need to think about this."

"Yes ma'am," Poe said. He rubbed his chin. "_If_ those codes still work and we use one of them, we don't have to restrict ourselves to a dinky little supply station. We could highjack an incoming starship carrier and use _that_ to take the station."

"Yes, I will consider such possibilities as well, thank you."

They lapsed into silence.

Tapping her chin with a finger, the General pulled a datapad toward herself and started pulling up data. Absently: "You're dismissed for now. Unless you intend to stay for tea."

"Tea?" Poe asked, looking around. "There's tea?"

"There will be if somebody brews it."

With a snort, he stood, warned Poe, "It tastes like soap just like everything else that grows around there," and went to rummage through his mother's cupboards for cups and a teapot. A bowl of tea leaves was already on the counter, freshly picked and dried. Someone out there was really making the most of that chem-checker.

"Beggars can't be choosers." From the corner of his eyes, he saw Poe shrug and tilt his head, considering. "So you didn't get the keys to the kingdom when you killed Snoke, huh? That's a bummer."

"He never intended to be replaced. He never intended to _die_."

Poe barked out a laugh. "Like anyone ever does. A well-thinking person takes precautions for the eventuality regardless. Was he that arrogant about anything else? Because we could use a couple more dumb oversights like that."

Here he was, a murderous double defector, a failure at every goal he'd ever set himself, waiting on his mother like a household droid – and the thing that made shame tighten its chilly tendrils around his rib cage was _this?_ Cheap potshots aimed at the master he had killed with his own hands?

_You have no idea what you're talking about,_ he thought with a shivery-lunged fervor. _You didn't know him. You never witnessed his might and wisdom._

(_'I cannot be betrayed. I cannot be beaten. I see his mind, I see his every intent.'_

And yet, in the end, he had killed Snoke with a mere flick of his fingers.

He tried not to think of how much sooner he might have been able to do that, how many opportunities just like it he may have wasted. If Snoke hadn't loomed so large and seemed so invulnerable in his mind, if he hadn't been such a fucking _coward_, he could have been home years ago, could have said 'no' and walked away before the hole in –

Or he could have been dead like all the others, and no-one would have ever found his body.)

(Who was he even kidding. He wouldn't have gone home. The only thing that terrified him more than Snoke's disapproval was his family saying, _'See? We were right all along. You should have just died when we told you to.'_)

"Snoke was strong with the Dark Side of the Force, it wasn't as hubristic coming from him as it would have been from any other," he insisted.

Poe just rolled his eyes. "Still, come on. You can't tell me he didn't even train you to take over in case of an emergency or something."

"I can, because he didn't," he said, turning his back to crush a handful of leaves into the boiling water.

_Which is why I spent the two weeks I was in charge entirely on clean-up and trying to catch up on responsibilities I was never prepared for. So excuse me the lackluster defection,_ he thought morosely.

Poe still refused to get the hint.

"I thought you were Snoke's right-hand man?"

"Apprentice. There's a difference."

"So what _did_ you do for the First Order, exactly? Besides breaking into people's brains and computers."

"You really are that ill-informed, are you?"

"But now we've got our very own high-ranked defector, second only to Snoke, so that's the end of that problem," Poe said with a pointed smile.

He put the teapot and the cups on the table and considered excusing himself to go punch something out in those woods he wasn't allowed into. But he'd be damned if he let Poe Dameron win in front of his own mother.

"I did whatever Snoke asked of me," he said, sitting back down between her and Poe.

"Yeah, that's informative. Come on, I'm sure your résumé is very impressive. Spill."

He shot Poe a withering look, only dialing it back slightly when his mother raised her head, equally curious.

"I studied and I trained to master the Dark Side of the Force. That was always a constant, and my highest priority. When I first arrived, I got sent to bootcamp like anybody else, and then to officer training and initiation into the ancient orders of Force Knights of Snoke's homeworld. That's what the Knights of Ren were based on, while they lasted."

"Hold up, his homeworld?"

"He never told me what it was called. Only that it was located deep within the Unknown Regions, it was lost centuries ago to the naturally-occurring cosmic vagaries surrounding its system, and its inhabitants followed their own path to the Force, never having been corrupted by the history of the Jedi or the Sith."

"How do you know he was telling the truth?"

He threw up his hands in exasperation. "It's what he told me, is what I know."

Poe grunted noncommittally. His mother made a note on her datapad and motioned her head for him to continue. He blew out a noisy breath of exasperation and quietly dug his nails into his palms.

"The first year and a half or so my duties weren't much different from any other low-ranking officer's. Getting the hang of how things worked in the Unknown Regions, under the Order. But the more proficient I became with the Dark Side, the more my work narrowed down to that. I often led small, specialized units supporting me on missions that benefitted from my skill set or were of unusual importance. Other times, I got called into bigger operations. And as I said, I worked with internal security a lot. Keeping the rest of the Order in line."

"What rank did that give you, exactly?" his mother asked. "I was never able to suss that out."

"None. I operated outside the chain of command. As his apprentice and the instrument of his will, I wielded Snoke's own authority. As long as it didn't interfere with orders issued by Snoke himself, I could order any course of action and requisition whatever resources and manpower I wanted, whenever I wanted it, with no questions asked."

"That sounds suspiciously Vader-esque," she said, face carefully neutral.

He forced himself not to look away. "That was the idea."

Poe whistled through his teeth and mouthed _'awkward'_. "Cushy," he said with forced cheer.

He shrugged and crossed his arms over his chest. "What's the point in keeping the most powerful Force user in decades on hand if you're not going to put his skills to good use? Our relationship was mutually beneficial. Snoke taught me everything I needed to know, and in return I put his lessons to use in his service. But he _wasn't_ stupid," he insisted. "Ultimately, my privileges existed to serve Snoke's agenda, not my own. It was the same as with my override codes. You don't train someone up to be the only person in the galaxy who could defeat you, and then give them every opportunity to do so, too."

Recklessly, not knowing the reason why but knowing the only reason why not was 'fuck you', he went on: "I wasn't paid, I was provided for; I could have anything I wanted, but not accumulate assets independently of Snoke. Which both put me ahead of everyone else, because Stormtroopers get nothing but what's assigned to them and officer's wages are limited while I could spend indiscriminately, and kept everything I did under Snoke's watchful eye. I wasn't a citizen of the First Order's sovereign territories, I was an 'esteemed guest' being hosted by the head of state; I had more authority, rights and privileges than anyone, but only as long as Snoke allowed it. He never let me forget it. I had no standing in the First Order without him."

"...well that's not creepy at all," Poe said. He was getting that look again, from when he'd grilled him about the destruction of the temple. Thoughts like _'dog on a leash'_ and _'spice daddy'_ bubbled up in Poe's mind.

It was like a fly buzzing around his head in the Force, and he shook his head to chase it off.

"Exactly, it wasn't. It was a fair and honest trade. Snoke never pretended his countermeasures were anything other than what they were. I was untrustworthy," he said flippantly, like it meant nothing to him, and he dared either of them to call him on it. "Obstinate, contrary." Indecisive. "I never learned. It was his way of protecting himself from me, because he knew I was all too often one step away from using the power he helped me cultivate to do something stupid."

Snoke had cherished him above all others, but his regard was not without conditions. For Kylo Ren, that had been no reason to treasure it any less, because Ben Solo had learned long ago that he wasn't a little kid anymore, so attention and affection were things to be earned, not owed.

At least Snoke had been honest about it.

He could _feel_ Poe and his mother exchange glances over his head. His eyes shot up – only to be met with a flash-bang of hot, sharp, pyrrhic victory.

"Well, for what it's worth, I'm proud of you," his mother said, mouth hard. "Having to look over his shoulder every second he was keeping you there was the least he deserved."

_Of course _you_ would be,_ he thought, and: _That makes one of us._

"I wouldn't have been much of a Dark apprentice if I hadn't even been able to do that," he said dismissively.

"I hope you destroyed his vast collection of Employer of the Year awards when you moved into his office," Poe said.

Suddenly, inexplicably, that made him shake with suppressed laughter. He bit his lip to contain the urge to smile and said, "I had his corpse dissolved in acid, does that count?"

A beat of stunned silence. But then, Poe made no effort to stifle his morbid amusement, howling with laughter, and, weak to the contagion, his mother let out a hearty bellow.

"Sweetheart, if I had any alcohol on hand, we'd toast to that."

"'Does that count', he asks," Poe laughed, clapping him on the back. "'Does that count!'"

Pressing his hand to his mouth, he waited for the hilarity to die down and his face to submit back to his control. He couldn't believe he'd said that, but somehow, he didn't really _care_ either.

"Tell me about those missions you mentioned," his mother said eventually, having poured them all tea. "The First Order has been secretly building on the remnants of the Empire since the Galactic Concordance was signed and told them they weren't allowed do that anymore, but we know next to nothing about how they did it. We have our spies, of course, but the Unknown Regions and their own ruthlessness hid them so well, most of what we've been able to glean of their activities between their retreat from the known galaxy and the activation of Starkiller Base has been from the effects of their breaches of Concordance terms on Outer Rim border worlds.

You were with them for ten years, and you weren't limited to a life of training regimens and propaganda and menial rookie work like Finn. Other than secret police, what kind of work did a heavy hitter like you to do while the First Order was still only in its building in the shadows stages?"

Where to start?

He took a sip of tea, still undecided on whether or not it was worth drinking when any tea-like taste had to compete with the strong impression that he was drinking liquid soap. Hot and flavorful was hot and flavorful, but that – and the fact that it was chemically harmless to most humanoid species – was about the only thing it had going for it.

"I spent most of 27 trough 32 ABY scouring the Unknown Regions, looking for unusual Force phenomena that might reveal yet untapped knowledge of the Force. Snoke was especially interested in something legends called 'the source of the Dark Side'."

The General looked confused, but Poe leaned forward in his seat, wide-eyed and as eagerly tense as a predator with its eye on a prey.

"The what now?"

It didn't take reading Poe's mind to see that he hoped that if the Dark Side had a 'source', it took the form of something they could destroy, so as to rid the galaxy of it forever.

He scoffed and made a dismissive gesture. "Anyone with a lick of Force-sensitivity could tell you the very concept is banthashit. There is no more an external 'source' for the Dark Side than there is for the Light. The Force is the bright shadow-image of the circle of life in all its stages, the end. Neither of I nor Snoke actually thought that's what it is. But old tales from all throughout the Unknown Regions speak of a similar darkness, so vast, so deep, so ancient, Snoke _had_ to know the truth at the source of it."

"So what was it?" his mother asked.

He shrugged. "I never found out."

"What?!" Poe exclaimed. "Oh, come on."

"We had a newfangled Imperial map of the Regions, but that doesn't count for as much as you'd think," he said, pressing his lips into a tight line. "The First Order had to learn the political situation in every new system they crossed into the hard way. Few parts of the place are actually safe and easy to navigate. Any deviation from our established routes was a gamble. I kept losing ships. Crews. I don't even remember what happened the last time I was sent out there. One day we were nearing a promising site, the next I woke up in an escape pod with at least seventy-two hours of amnesia caused by head trauma. Never got those memories back."

Even though he had obviously made it out fine, his mother looked alarmed. "How did you _survive_ that?"

"Some cosmic phenomenon jammed all interstellar communications. I floated for a week before I was picked up by a passing vessel. Local civilization. No hyperdrive tech, but they'd found a relatively safe way to travel around their own planetary neighborhood in a way our ships simply weren't capable of. They were on their way back to their planet and brought me along to recuperate. They'd never been in contact with the First Order; they assumed I belonged to a civilian exploration expedition, like the other handful of times their civilization had encountered aliens before me."

He hesitated. For years, he'd tried to think about that time as little as possible. He didn't even like to recall their names. Dredging it all up now felt almost like trespassing into the memories of a different man.

"They were very... compassionate, to my imagined plight. When I told them I still had people outside, waiting for me, they gave me a place aboard the next ship that left atmo, two months later. Eight months after that, we finally reached a point in space where the First Order could pick me up. So I got in another pod and they went back to the shelter of their solar system, and that was the end of my explorations of the Unknown Regions."

Poe shot his mother a look, and then took him in. "Ten months just to get back? Sounds to me like the easier thing would've been to just stay gone."

"What?" he said, for a moment utterly uncomprehending.

"No ship, no communication channels, no way for the First Order to enter the region," Poe went on, as if his argument was the only logical one. "Did it really never occur to you that you didn't _have_ to go back?"

It would have been nice, if he could have stayed. He'd buried that thought as deep as he could at the time, but there was no denying it anymore. It had been a beautiful planet. Peaceful. He was glad it was out of reach of the rest of the galaxy.

But here and now, years removed from his all too brief almost-reprieve from the real world, he could only stare. "Of course not. Just because the planet was unreachable didn't mean _I_ was."

Poe cocked his head. "But you just said...?"

He had to fight the urge to be the one looking at – for – his mother, now.

He made his voice as flat as he could. He didn't want to be saying this. (_Hush now, dear boy, there's no need to be alarmed. I'm nothing to be scared of. You've known me all your life, don't you see?_) It was _(private, precious, their little secret)_ just a few simple words, but words would only get it wrong. (_Better not tell your parents about what we did today, child. They don't understand the Force like you and I do._) He'd been trying for twenty-five years and even in his own mind, getting it 'right' was like squeezing water. (_Your uncle? Now why would you do that. Your uncle's understanding of the Force, of the universe, was shaped by beings so refusing of anything that deviated from their doctrine it took only a handful of men to bring down an order ten thousand strong. I know this is hard for you to accept, but your uncle's mind is ruined. He thinks he means well, but he would fear and condemn what we have. What we _are_._) The words were almost impossible to get out. (_What_ you _are._)

But Snoke was dead, he'd killed that monster himself and half the time he wasn't even sorry about it, so the words were impossible to keep in, too.

"Snoke's mind has been –" entwined with? inside of? molding and penetrating? waving hello from across the galaxy and helping him with his homework? "– in contact with mine, in some way or another, for. As long as I can remember. He's spoken to me in the Force since I was a child. He never had to set foot in known space to do it," he forced out, in fits and starts. "The physical distance between us during those months meant nothing. He was in my head. Whenever he wanted to be. Always. Anywhere I went."

There. That was all. Simple. Right?

Right?

Shit. This was a mistake. Why did he have to open his fool mouth? He shouldn't have told them any of that, not about the expeditions or his status in the Order or how close he and the Supreme Leader had been and how early Mister Snoke had stepped in to pick up the slack when –

(This was, what, the third time in all his life he'd spoken of it? It got worse every time.

He closed his shaking hands around his knees. How could it still be getting _worse?_)

Poe looked at Mom. Mom nodded gravely.

"We knew... some of that. We suspected... _some_ kind of Dark Side interference. But not enough. Not until it was too late."

(How could he? The betrayal was like lightning down his arms and thunder in his skull. _How could he?_ He wanted to pound his head into a wall until he blacked out. What he and Snoke had was too big, too important, to expose to disrespectful eyes, too sacred to allow ignorant thoughts to sully it. If either of them so much as breathed in his direction, he would – )

Poe dragged a hand down his face. "For fuck's sake..."

Already he wanted to scream _'It wasn't like that!'_ He wasn't even looking at them, but he could tell exactly what both of them were thinking.

Sometimes he _despised_ the Force.

"You know, when I asked you what the fuck had gotten into you to make you turn into Kylo Ren, you could have started with that!" Poe said.

"You wanted to know what had _changed_. Snoke's presence never did," he ground out with immense effort.

_This is going to be the most miserable execution ever,_ Poe thought. He was imagining himself with a chest full of medals, grizzled but triumphant before a galaxy he had helped liberate, while the war criminal Kylo Ren was a pathetic lump of a person being led before the blasting squad, his head hanging and his bottom lip caught between his teeth. Guilty as Sith, and yet the sorriest thing Poe had seen in a good long while – a twisted, unsalvageable monster that looked just like little Ben Solo used to, when they were boys making childish trouble during a day of solemn, grown-up ceremony they didn't truly understand.

That broke the spell right quick.

"I'm flattered you think I'd even survive that long, if that's how you see me," he sneered.

Poe's head shot up, startled.

"See how easy it is? I wasn't even trying this time."

"So you were gone for almost a year, and when you returned, your reconnaissance missions into the Unknown Regions came to an end," his mother interrupted with a pointed look to them both. "Why was that?"

He and Poe continued their staring contest for a few moments more before looking away, almost simultaneously.

"Construction of Starkiller Base had gotten underway in earnest by the time I made it back," he said. _Of course_ Snoke's change of heart hadn't had anything to do with his objections about the wastefulness and recklessness of his missions, he thought, bitter even now. His soft-hearted squeamishness hadn't saved his troops; Hux's technological breakthroughs had. "Snoke wasn't nearly so focused on digging up prehistoric superweapons anymore once he was finally sure he could build one of his own."

"Is that what that 'source of the Dark Side' was?" she asked.

He shrugged one shoulder. The hunted feeling of knowing he had disobeyed his master wouldn't be leaving any time soon, and he knew no amount of violence would burn through it for long. He leashed it down tightly and told himself: _You have a new master now, and she is your mother and she loves you. Make _her_ proud._

"That's what Snoke theorized. He thought it might even be the reason the Unknown Regions are the way they are. Some kind of hyper-advanced technology predating any of the current space-faring civilizations, capable of twisting space itself beyond recognition a quarter galaxy at a time. Something like that could very well create a sinkhole in the Force that, over time, drew in and became saturated with so much Dark energy that it started looking like a primordial wellspring of it."

There was a long moment of silence.

"Good thing you didn't find anything like that, then," she eventually said. "The galaxy would probably no longer be here if you had."


	8. IV - One Maze Or Another (II)

They went over their options until mealtime, at which point his mother sent him out to play errand boy again and finally dismissed Poe. Outlasting him was a hollow victory.

The hallway they were in was empty when Poe said from behind him: "Hey, Ben."

He turned. Poe had drawn his thoughts and feelings deep down inside of himself, belatedly remembering his training; lessons on how to resist rudimentary forms of mental probing in the Force even if you didn't have any access to it yourself, which his mother had passed on to her people to thwart Kylo Ren just as her father had spread them around in the Rebellion of old to thwart Darth Vader. Poe's face was a blank, unreadable mask.

"Having Snoke in your head," Poe said. "Did that feel anything like being interrogated?"

_Not wasting any time, huh?_ He was almost glad. He hated waiting for these kinds of things.

"Sometimes," he answered.

"So you knew first-hand what it was like."

"Yes."

"Ever since you were a kid."

He clenched his trembling jaw. "Yes."

"And then you grew up and joined the ISB and started doing it to other people," Poe finished.

There was no shame. Only a resignation to the inevitability of pain to come that felt as old as his bones. "Yes."

Poe nodded absently to himself and, expression tight, looked at the ground, at the wall, at the empty stretch of hallway over his sometimes-friend turned stranger's shoulder.

"Why?" Poe asked hoarsely.

"Because Snoke told me to."

"Right," Poe said faintly, as people often did when they wanted to feel less like a conversation was a hill they were tumbling down headfirst. "Right." He took a deep breath, raised his eyes toward the ceiling for a moment, and then swept them down to meet Ben's, or Kylo's, or whoever the hell he was now. Head held high and his shoulders squared. "Just one more thing. When you interrogated me – was it personal?"

"Yes," he answered, equally unflinching.

"So does it always hurt that bad or were you making it worse for me on purpose?"

"It doesn't have to. But seeing you again – seeing Lor San Tekka again – didn't put me in a mood to be gentle. And gentle would have taken longer. I wanted to spend as little time in your presence as necessary." He worked his jaw. "I usually step in sooner when another interrogator resorts to torture, but I was hoping you'd break before I was forced to take over."

"Right," Poe said again. "Good to know."

Poe fell silent. This clearly wasn't the end, though. There was something more Poe wanted, some last, crucial thing he needed time to build up to.

So he waited.

Eventually: "Did you enjoy it?"

"No," he said simply.

Nodding to himself some more, Poe walked away without another word.

**I-oOo-I**

The deciding factor in General Organa's decision about the supply station raid was an abandoned old probe droid somebody discovered in an air vent.

Poe had dragged him to one of the communal rooms to get the Stormtrooper's read on his claims about the override codes.

"You know what 'classified information' means, don't you? If he knows anything about it, I will eat my shoes. I'll let you hand-feed them to me," he'd said.

Poe hadn't cared. The trooper had walked away from the First Order clean-handed and Kylo Ren hadn't, therefore the trooper was the more reliable source. Simple as that.

Which was how he'd come to be staring vacantly into the middle distance while Poe and the Stormtrooper stuck their heads together, and noticed the droid. The middle distance happened to include a stocky, round-faced, dark-haired young woman in mechanic's overalls. She was tinkering with the droid in between fidgeting and shooting him murderous glares. The droid was the most effusively grateful and enthusiastic patient he had ever seen, and he ignored it as thoroughly as he did the girl and her discomfort.

The Stormtrooper knew nothing, of course. His only contribution was furiously whispered tales of terror about Kylo Ren's reputation for ominous mystery and unpredictable outbursts of supernatural power, bla bla bla. And okay, sure, _maybe_ that level of computer access was a logical part of the package, but had he mentioned that Poe shouldn't believe a word he said yet? Because the trooper wasn't sure eighteen times was quite enough to drive that point home.

He thought that even a Stormtrooper should be smart enough to realize when he was provoking one of those 'unpredictable' outbursts, but then again, those kids weren't trained to think critically or have overly much self-preservation instinct.

The girl put the spindly retractable arms she'd been working on back on the droid, and he absently noted what kind of droid it was. He hadn't been able to tell before.

"Really? They'd just walk away?" Poe asked laughingly.

"Are you kidding? Nothing good ever comes from sticking around when he starts throwing one of his little tantrums," the Stormtrooper scoffed.

Then he had an idea. Ignoring the others' noises of inquiry and indignation, he shot up from his stiff, strained semblance of calm and marched over to the mechanic.

"That probe," he demanded, pointing. "Is it space-worthy?"

"Why?" she asked, drawing it to her suspiciously.

"Is it?"

"_Why?_"

"Hey, leave Rose alone!" the Stormtrooper said, grabbing his arm.

Eyes practically rolling out of his head, he yanked away from him. He looked over at Poe, who was right on his favorite traitor's heels, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the mechanic.

"The supply station is constantly being pummeled by small pieces of debris. It has permanent environmental shielding to protect it, low energy demand; power-guzzling defensive shielding doesn't go up until scouts or sensors detect a threat. But the sensors are calibrated to ignore anything the size of a space rock. Like that droid. If it's functional enough to send out into space, it could tell us exactly what you'd be flying into."

"Excellent idea," Poe said. "You couldn't have asked her that nicely?"

"And deprive her boyfriend of his chance to come to her rescue?"

The mechanic and the Stormtrooper squawked like children with their first crush. The General approved of the plan.

(The conversation he had feared to be imminent while they'd presented the plan to her was postponed indefinitely as she threw herself into this mission.

_Same old Mom,_ he thought. There was a palpable release of unpleasant anticipation in his chest. He wasn't sure if it was disappointment or relief.)

**I-oOo-I**

The droid had been left behind by accident.

She had originally been assigned to monitor the perimeter of the base. One day, however, her master had called her inside to deal with an infestation in one of the air ducts. Should have been a job for an MSE droid, but the only one on base had died weeks before. Predictably, the probe droid kept getting stuck in the too-narrow vents, and had to abort her mission. She was a determined little thing, though, and when the news came not long after that the war was over and the base would be decommissioned, she gave it one last, desperate try.

And she got stuck again.

While she beeped and twittered endlessly for someone, anyone to help her out of her distant rock shaft trap, her master and all the other organics packed up their things, gathered the rest of the droids, said their goodbyes, and sealed the bunker. Her delicate sensors had picked up the decreasing numbers of lifeforms; the grinding tremors of durasteel on stone as hatches were sealed one by one; and the last, whispering purrs of engines lifting off into the atmosphere, somewhere beyond the rock.

Months later, she finally managed to wriggle herself loose, several appendages short and with her round black body all scratched up, but only more determined for it. She knew she was alone. She knew she had no more directives to follow. Yet she floated on, patrolling the dark, empty hallways of the bunker and dutifully saving her findings in her memory banks, and called out for her master and her friends.

She called, and called, and called, and nobody came. It was an accident, she was sure. They wouldn't have left her behind on purpose. She was a good, loyal droid. She had never failed them. So she called, and called, and called. She called out until the years caught up to her and her batteries ran out, and she crawled back into the vent that had taken her arms and legs from her, and powered down to sleep.

It was cruel, he thought, how much personality and emotional awareness his fellow organics insisted on giving even to creatures for whom the only purpose it could serve was to hurt. She was Rey in droid form. It took barely an hour in the general vicinity of this probe for him to start regretting nominating her for the mission. Her happiness at being found at last was indescribable. Her desire to be of use again like nothing he had ever seen. She talked people's ears off any moment she didn't have a task to fulfill, and many she did.

Designated 0-LNY, the droid quickly became known on base as Ellen.

He couldn't stop thinking of her as Lonely.

**I-oOo-I**

"When I founded the Resistance, our mission was to raise awareness of a threat the New Republic was intent on ignoring. To provide pushback against the First Order's actions where the New Republic Navy could or would not, whether due to territorial restrictions or corruption and cowardice. We were to be the first line of defense against a danger nobody else wanted to believe was real and dangerous. A buffer that, once the First Order inevitably escalated to open hostilities, would give the New Republic the time it needed to finally prepare the necessary forces to retaliate.

In that, we failed."

The only set of clothing General Organa had left was the mourning gown she had donned in the wake of her husband's death. Her wearing it now was inevitable, but also undeniably effective. And while of all those gathered, perhaps only Ben Solo of Alderaan knew the significance of her change of hairstyle, she radiated that message loud and clear too.

Death. Destruction. But not the end.

"The New Republic and its navy are no more," she said, her voice strong and clear. One by one, she looked all her warriors in the eye. "Like my home planet of Alderaan before it, the Hosnian System was annihilated by a weapon we had no knowledge of until it was too late. My brother, Jedi Master Luke Skywalker, is dead.

But we have claimed victories also. Like both Death Stars before it, the First Order's Starkiller weapon is destroyed. Their leader is dead. Their strongest warrior, their Jedi, my son Ben, has returned to our side at long last. And few as our remaining numbers are, we have two other invaluable new recruits as well: Rey, a newly awakened young Jedi, and Finn, an incredibly brave former Stormtrooper who, like my son, has brought us priceless intelligence on the inner workings of the First Order.

We did that with four hundred people, four warships, two dozen starfighters, and a handful of bombers. We are the living proof that the First Order is not invulnerable. That they can and _will_ be beaten. We are few and vulnerable now, but we will not remain that way. Resistance and rebellion grow wherever there is tyranny and oppression to oppose. The Light of justice is a fungus no Darkness will ever be able to eradicate.

We are its spark. The first, and perhaps, by necessity, the brightest. But we will never be the only one. More will alight wherever darkness falls, wherever the First Order tries to touch. It's only a matter of time."

She stepped forward and turned on the holotank.

"Time is why I have called all of you here. At present, we are few and vulnerable. Our allies are far away and have not responded to our hails for several weeks now. Much as I hate to say it, we have to assume that even if they have not forsaken us entirely, they will not prioritize our handful of stragglers over their home stations and planets and systems and sectors. We can no longer wait for them to find a loophole through which to reach out a hand to us. It's time for us to take matters back into our own hands. To rebuild this Rebellion to a foundation that will unite like minds all across the galaxy. We did it a generation ago. We can do it again. And thanks to the intel we have on the First Order, Ben and Commander Dameron have found the perfect first step to take toward that goal."

Gesturing to Poe, she took a step back. With a respectful nod, Poe stepped forward, drew up the relevant data on the holotank, and laid out the plan. Stage one: he'd fly in in the Upsilon to take out the station's defenses and cripple its functioning, and BB-8 would slice into the station controls to herd its occupants to where they wanted them through strategic misuse of the environmental controls. Stage two: Chewie arriving in the Falcon with a contingent of soldiers to secure the station and dispatch the fenced-in First Order troops and personnel, and then make off with anything they could carry or fly. Stage three: the Resistance's position would be just a little bit more secure, Ben and Poe would teach anyone up for the challenge how to fly a TIE, and they would be that much better equipped for whatever came their way next.

"Any questions?" Poe asked once he was done.

A man to his left immediately raised his hand. "How can we be sure this intel is sound?"

"All this seems a little overelaborate for a trap when Ben could've just mowed us all down with his lightsaber the moment he arrived," Poe answered flippantly. "But we're sending a probe droid ahead to scout the site too, don't worry."

0-LNY beeped excitedly from her place in the mechanic's lap.

The man jerked his head in his direction. "And what's Ren's role going to be in all this?"

"Keeping my seat warm here in the control room," Poe said. "He won't be involved any further."

There was a low murmur of approval and relief.

"And you really plan to take down an entire space station by yourself, in just that shuttle?" a different, younger man asked. "We have a few qualified pilots left still, you should have back-up for that."

"No," Poe said. "I'm good for the challenge and we can't risk the Falcon for that part."

The younger man's expression tightened nervously. "Can't we wait a little longer for reinforcements to arrive? Half of Black Squadron is still at large, there's our network of spies and informants in the field, and our allies –"

General Organa raised her hand, and the man instantly fell silent. She said:

"We never had enough allies with the kind of resources and firepower we need, and if they haven't shown by now, we can't rely on them to do so anytime soon. We have to face the facts. Starkiller punched a hole through hyperspace and took out an entire star system from halfway across the galaxy. It scared everyone into submission. The Empire took twenty years to roll out its first Death Star. The way most of the galaxy sees it, Starkiller was the First Order's opening bid. People are afraid of what else they might have in store."

"So we tell them they've got nothing else of the sort, that it's just ordinary naval warfare from here on out. We have it straight from the source!" a woman said.

He made a face. He had said no such thing.

"What's that expression mean?" the Stormtrooper, sitting as far away from him in the seat next to him as he could manage, asked sharply. "Why is your face doing that? Is there something you're not telling us?"

"Oh gods, please don't tell me they _do_ have something else," a female voice behind him muttered.

"If they have another Starkiller, I wouldn't know about it," he said, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped. "I was locked out of that project. B–"

"Oh _gods_," the girl behind him moaned.

He shot her an annoyed look over his shoulder before turning back to address the room. "_But_, I can say that it's staggeringly unlikely. Snoke wasn't the type of man to open up a second resource black hole like that before the original had proven itself. He wouldn't even get near Starkiller Base once it entered the final stages of construction, in case something malfunctioned and it blew up in his face. And no, they don't have anything else that comes close in terms of destructive potential."

The Resistance heaved a collective sigh of relief.

"Unfortunately, what we know doesn't necessarily mean anything to the rest of the galaxy," General Organa said. "We got the word out that Starkiller was destroyed before we evacuated D'Qar, but the First Order might well cast fatal doubt on even that. Unlike ours, the secret allies _they've_ been cultivating within the New Republic will have been emboldened by their victory. No doubt the agents they've corrupted or converted in secret are shedding their secrecy and helping cement the First Order's claims on the galaxy as we speak. They've got the advantage of a propaganda machine now, and we can barely say 'hi' to a neighboring system without risking our lives."

"For now," Poe said. "If we pull off this operation, that's going to change."

"For now," she agreed. "Volunteers for stage two of the plan, raise your hands. Positions not filled by volunteers will be assigned. We need..."

While the General turned to the operational and logistical details of the mission and the Resistance began to mobilize around him to carry them out, he leaned back in his seat with his arms crossed over his chest. The Stormtrooper was going, because it was a good idea to have someone with first-hand experience of the First Order in the field, and they trusted him to be that person. Rey was going, because the Resistance worshiped her and life on Jakku had hardwired an intolerance for idleness into her that the past few weeks of running and hiding had not offered nearly enough distractions for. The terrified girl behind him prayed quickly to her gods and then stepped forward with shaking hands but squared shoulders to offer her services.

_They're all going to die,_ he thought.

Not on this mission, most likely. Maybe not even soon. But this was not a fight many, if any, of them were going to live to see the end of – let alone a triumphant one. There had been death and destruction and it had not been the end, no. There would be more death, more destruction, and that would not be the end either.

What he was beginning to realize, with possibly the worst timing in history, was that it would _never_ end.

Just as the Sith had endured for centuries, two-by-two, careful and tenacious, the forces of the Light would persist in perpetuity, sprouting wherever they were given the slightest hint of an opportunity, like weeds growing through cracks in the duracrete.

_'War is an unsustainable state of being that will always seek to resolve itself,'_ his mother had often said.

_'Peace is unnatural and can be disrupted with the briefest touch or the softest whisper,'_ Snoke had claimed.

And he did not doubt that both of them spoke with a grain of truth.

_'So never give up hope, Ben. No conflict is unsolvable, just as no night lasts forever.'_

_'So do not despair, Kylo Ren. Rejoice, for the Force will only ever test our resolve by giving us exactly what we want.'_

Those things, however, he could not find it in himself to agree with.

**I-oOo-I**

_'I'm being torn apart.'_

He'd whined to his father like a child before he killed him. He hadn't wanted to do it. But he hadn't known what _else_ to do, where else he had left to drive the blade home in search of the source of his revolting weakness, and start cutting.

_'End the cycle, Kylo Ren. It is your destiny. The only reason you were born. Did you think Leia Organa hadn't taken precautions against the possibility of your existence? Raising a child would only have taken time away from her_ true _passion: meddling in the affairs of the entire galaxy. She comes by her desire for dominance naturally, of course, but it is not meant for her. _You_ are the one who shall right all that is wrong. The Force willed it, and a measly little hormone implant wasn't going to stop it from getting what it wanted.'_

It had been his destiny, and he had tried and tried and tried to do right by it, but in the end, he had thrown it all away. Because it was too _hard_. Because he was too weak and selfish and needy. Because _'you need these people more than they will ever need you'_. Because to burn the entire galaxy down and build a new, better world in the fertile soil of its ashes required first doing so to himself, to his own family, and he couldn't do it.

He wasn't conflicted anymore, not really. _'Protect Mom.'_ It was a simple goal. His feelings about it were unilateral.

Helping Mom win her war would protect her. He just wasn't sure he saw any _other_ point to it anymore.

Helping Snoke win _his_ war had been part of the package of pledging his loyalty too, but back then, his loyalty hadn't been the only reason he did it. He had _believed_ in winning, believed in the _cause_.

Conviction had taken its sweet time to sprout roots and flourish when he joined the First Order. But now that he had recognized it for the self-deception it was, how would it ever grow again for the Resistance?


	9. V - -struction (I)

_In which lightsabers come apart and plans come together._

**V - -struction**

"Look, I don't know what to say to the kinds of... to what you said, last time," Rey started. She was finally deigning to speak to him again, but hardly seemed happy about it. He was already making her miserable. What a surprise.

"Lucky me," he muttered.

"But just so you know, I disagree," she declared firmly. "With all of it. If you start talking like that again, we'll spend the entire time yelling at each other, and I don't want that."

He imagined returning her hard stare in kind. Maybe he actually did it, too. "Me neither."

"So let's just focus on the Jedi stuff, yeah?"

"Yes."

She nodded to herself, all bluster. "Alright. First off, Leia thinks it's a good idea if I bring the lightsaber on the mission. Can you help me fix it? There aren't any manuals on kyber crystals or lightsabers on the holonet. I would just try some stuff out, but this thing blew up on me once already and I'd rather not lose a hand."

From a sheath her belt improvised from orange flight suit scraps, she produced two mangled pieces of metal, which had been his grandfather's lightsaber until they tore it apart. He had suspected that something like this must have happened to cause the explosion that had knocked him out, but to see the result for himself took him aback.

Another family legacy he'd ruined.

Rey paused and shot him a cagey look. "...by which I mean, do you, uh, have the technical knowledge to get a lightsaber working properly?"

He raised an eyebrow.

"It's just that yours is... odd."

"You mean you think it's a piece of junk," he deadpanned. "Broken. A hack-job. Looks like its construction was the first time I'd ever held a hydrospanner."

"Alright, yes, that," she said, refusing to look him in the eye. "But if it was only a matter of hydrospanners I wouldn't be asking for your help, now would I?"

He wasn't even mad. "Can I see the crystal?"

She presented him with the ruined ends of both lightsaber pieces.

"Oh." He took them from her hands and examined them. "It snapped in half."

She pushed a roll of tools across the table. He took that too and went to work prying the pieces of crystal from their fittings. The hilt was a lost cause, but he made sure not to damage the interiors any further. Rey could at least use the pieces as an example when she built her own.

"Aside from the obvious, they're otherwise both intact," he said, squinting, twisted in his chair so he could hold them up to the light of her room's narrow window one by one. "You should have nothing to worry about. The smaller size will create a shorter blade, but it will be a stable one."

She leaned in close, her eyes bright with curiosity. "Are you saying _your_ crystal isn't intact? That's why the blade is so erratic?"

He held out his hand, palm up. After only a brief moment of incomprehension, she stood from her seat, unearthed his saber from a bag she kept under her bunk, and handed it to him.

He closed his gloved fingers around the hilt, and warmth radiated up his arm. Like all the missing it he hadn't done because of where it was and who had it caught up to him at once, as relief. _There you are,_ he thought. Perhaps a reflection of the crystal's pseudo-consciousness; perhaps just another outburst of sentimentality, of that weak, twisted, selfish part of him that couldn't let go of anything and got more upset about rocks and droids than it did sentient beings or the fate of the galaxy.

"That's not a very secure place to keep it," he remarked idly as he poked through Rey's tools.

"It's not like it matters."

"I'd really rather not have the riffraff running around with it."

"_Oh._ I thought you meant it wasn't a good place to hide it from _you_."

"That too."

She huffed. "Nobody steals from _me_. And they're not riffraff."

"No, they're worse. They're about as Force-sensitive as a pile of manure." He pulled the crystal from his saber and held it to the light between his thumb and forefinger. "Look."

She rolled her eyes, but bent her head to study the crystal – and the lightning-web of cracks reaching into the heart of it. "Huh. What happened to it?"

"Obviously I broke it," he said.

"Obviously, but how?"

He pulled it close and curled his fingers around it. Without looking away from that smouldering ember of familiar power, he said: "By committing great violence against it."

Rey rolled her eyes so hard he could feel it. "That's not an answer."

"What do you know about lightsaber colors?"

Frowning, she opened her mouth.

"Yes, it's relevant," he promised.

"Hm." Her frown turned contemplative. "Blue or green means you're a good guy and red means you're a bad guy. What?" she asked, seeing his pained grimace. "Everybody knows _that_."

He had to fight the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose.

"Okay. Historically, you're more right than wrong," he allowed. "But that's all it really is: history. Tradition turned superstition turned moral grandstanding – on both sides. Kyber is naturally colorless, and there's no inherent moral element to the way light reflects through a prism. You can leave a kyber crystal as is or give it any color of the rainbow, and it means nothing but what you _want_ it to mean."

"Alright, the pretty colors are merely decorative. Got it. What's that got to do with your crystal breaking?" She crossed her arms over her chest.

His hand clenched spasmodically around the object in question. "I hadn't learned that lesson yet when I tried to bleed it."

"Bleed it?"

"That's what the Sith called the process of turning their sabers red."

"But only some species have red blood," Rey said dubiously. "What did blue or green-blooded Sith call it, 'iron-oxidizing' the crystal?"

"Exactly. Human-centric nonsense. The effectiveness is obvious, because sentient creatures all across the galaxy soil themselves in fear at the sight of a red lightsaber, but ultimately it was nothing but habit and propaganda power." He gestured with his free hand. "The Sith had a tradition of stealing the lightsaber of a Jedi they'd killed and filling it with their own anger and pain until the crystal became overwhelmed by it and the kinship with the original wielder was broken. They'd declared red the color of pain."

Her face twisted, obviously disturbed. "So they... they beat their lightsabers into submission?"

"Yes. Like trophies. Spoils of war."

"You didn't steal _this one_ from a dead Jedi, did you?"

_Depends. Does Ben Solo count?_ he thought. But what he said was: "No, this saber was always mine. Hurting it and believing that that will automatically turn it red is one way to do it, but you can fill a crystal with thoughts of red roses or Chandrilan honeybirds and get the same results. It's about meditation, pure and simple. There's no _need_ to involve blood, or violence of any kind." He took a deep, steadying breath through his nose. "Unless you want to end up with the results I did."

Setting her unease aside for the time being, Rey leaned her elbows on the table and nodded encouragingly.

He wished she wouldn't do that. Swallowing and rubbing his thumb along the base of the cracks, he gathered his thoughts.

"This is what happens when you forcefully try to make your crystal do something you think is wrong. I'd been with Snoke for... six months or so. Before that, I'd been studying under Skywalker for five years. I already had the basics of the Force and of sword fighting down, but most of my training had been informed by Skywalker's affiliation to the Light. Snoke was teaching me the ways of the Dark Side. Under the circumstances, the blue lightsaber I'd created with Skywalker was an eyesore. A constant reminder of where I'd come from. So Snoke made me change it. Before I was ready."

"Before you stopped thinking the color was important?"

"Before I stopped thinking the Dark Side might not be the right way to go."

She opened her mouth, searching for words, and closed it again.

And the thing that got to him most about it was, Snoke _himself_ didn't actually care about the color of his lightsaber when he gave the order. It took another year for his lord and master to divulge that little detail, but in the Force traditions of Snoke's homeworld, lightsabers never even featured. Hardly any of the known galaxy's traditions and philosophical tenets about the Force matched Snoke's people's. Even 'Light' and 'Dark' were counterintuitive concepts to him, he'd said; in his native tongue, only ever spoken by the all but extinct, nocturnal inhabitants of a long-gone planet, the closest thing to a concept of the Dark Side was the Soul of Days, hot and bright, and the equivalent of the Light side was the Soul of Nights, cool and calm. In the course of wandering the galaxy seeking knowledge, Snoke had acquired numerous lightsabers and similar artifacts, but he didn't _care_ about them the way a Jedi or a Sith would have.

He knew Ben Solo cared, though. And anything Ben Solo cared about was something to rid Kylo Ren of. For his own good and that of the galaxy he was meant to change.

_'How do you expect to do what needs to be done and achieve greatness when you can't even let go of the Light long enough to repaint a rock?'_

"Ben, if you were so certain it was wrong, why did you try so hard to turn yourself?" Rey asked carefully, and gestured to his crystal. "_Obviously_ it wasn't something that came naturally."

But as he had then, he thought of how early the fear and anger and pain had manifested, the path to the Dark Side calling to him before he'd even known it for what it was. He thought of the countless opportunities that had been granted to him by his mother's work and his father's wanderlust to grow naturally into the peace of detachment that had kept the Jedi in the Light and in power for a millennium. Of how the slowly increasing solitary hours with nobody but the droids to watch over him had only ever brought out the opposite in him. Of when doing everything right got him nowhere, again, and the mere thought of having to keep trying and trying and trying for even one more day stole his breath away like a mountain leaning on his chest. Of how making trouble or breaking things or hurting himself had been the only surefire way to get his parents' attention after a while, and how _right_ it had felt sometimes to do it.

So what if nicking himself with the pruning shears accidentally-on-purpose that one time had hurt worse than anything else he had felt as a child? It had startled him badly enough he had cried himself hoarse and vowed never to do something like that ever again. But there was so much blood it kept Dad from leaving for the rest of the day, and it got him a seemingly endless hug, and when he guiltily insisted on finishing his chores while the bacta patches made it so the injury may as well never have happened, Dad ruffled his hair and stuck close to help him out. A 'crazy' impulse and a little blood had bought him the nicest day he'd had in months.

Snoke had even risked revealing his presence, something little Ben Solo had still not always taken well to at the time, to praise his bravery.

So what if his early adolescent truancy when even the so-called nanny droid was too busy running errands for his mother to pay attention to him, and getting his father's fastest ship impounded for illegal joyriding right before a race, and the way he made the furniture rattle like his emotions were literal shockwaves had only ever led to more shouting and less meaningful conversation? It had felt good to turn the world around him into as much of a mess as they turned his insides into. Nothing felt right or real when everyone was pretending at civility and harmony he knew through the Force they didn't mean, when his entire life proceeded in its proper, orderly manner except for the self-contradictory chaos inside of him, of 'it's my fault' and 'it's their fault', 'I love you' and 'I hate you', 'please don't leave' and 'why do you even still bother coming back, just fuck off forever already' constantly vying for dominance. Sometimes, disrupting all of their lives had been the only thing that balanced the scales in his head. Making a mess of things had _forced_ his parents to pay attention and deal with him – and admit, even if not in words, how much they hated that. How much they resented the time and effort that went into raising him. How poorly they thought of him.

When he had a fresh reminder of that to press like a knife into his belly, the pain was worse than the pruning shears, but at least he felt less like he was being pulled in ten different directions for a while.

"You'd be surprised," he said evenly. And, when Rey looked disbelieving and mutinous and stubborn, he shook his head and added the other side of the story: "I owed Snoke everything. There was no place for me anywhere but at his side. The Dark Side was my destiny, as it had been my grandfather's before me. I had no choice."

"Of course you had a choice," she said emphatically, like that was supposed to convince him. Like it meant anything at all.

"Maybe," he said. "But what's a choice worth when there's only one viable option? It was meant to be. There was no point in fighting it. I just had to accept it, and the way I saw it, bleeding my crystal was part of that. I got the color right in the end, but – my hesitance showed true." _My first great failure in a long string of them,_ he thought. _The first sure sign that I'd never succeed at committing to either side._ "I wanted to go to Ilum or Christophsis or some place like that, find a new crystal and start from scratch, but Snoke forbade it. He promised his permission when I finished my training. Until then, the damage and resulting instability would be a reminder of my weakness and foolishness."

"That wasn't weak or foolish, Ben," Rey said, quietly but full of conviction. "It was your better nature fighting to protect you from Snoke's lies."

_It was my parents' misguided attempts at anchoring me to the Light fighting my _true_ nature,_ he thought. But she'd said she didn't want to spend the whole time fighting, and the longer they dwelled on it the less he wanted to talk about it to himself. He looked away.

"It doesn't matter anymore. He's dead."

His voice had been steady, but he couldn't keep the bitterness from bleeding through. He only hoped it hadn't given away the reproach that kept lurking around the edges of his thoughts of her.

_Why'd you have to come?_ those thoughts hissed furiously, heaving and curled in on themselves like a wounded animal. _Why'd you have to care? Why did you have to make _me_ care, make me hope, only to –_

To leave him with no ties left to the First Order, free to join his mother, and... and why couldn't he just stop feeling _guilty_ for Snoke's death?

"Snoke is dead," he repeated raggedly. "And this crystal is mine. We chose each other. She's not replaceable, and I'm not leaving her here for the _riffraff_ to play with."

He stuck the cracked piece of kyber in his pocket, under his tunic, and sent Rey a glare daring her to disagree.

Instead, her gaze softened. "You broke that poor rock's heart, didn't you?"

"Yes. And I'll carry that reminder until she mends."

"Kyber crystals can do that?" Surprised, she pushed the two halves of the blue crystal together.

"No."

"...ah. I see." She lowered her hands and studied him. "So. Not quite letting the past die after all, huh?"

His only answer was to give her a hard stare, and try not to let the burning in his eyes turn into actual tears.

He'd done this to his crystal for the cause, and then he'd given up. He'd captained so many suicide missions for the cause, and then he'd given up. He'd stood by and watched Hux fire Starkiller for the cause, and then he'd given up. He'd _killed Dad_ for the cause...

_'If you can do this, you can make the world better. You can end the endless cycle. The Force is with you and the Force needs you. You cannot fail, Kylo Ren,'_ Snoke had whispered to him, or he had whispered to himself, whenever doubt set in. Every day, every hour, every minute if he had to. _'This is what you were born to do. _You cannot fail.'

He didn't know what he hated himself for more; the trying or the quitting.

Pain without payoff, sacrifice without purpose. Nothing about that was right, or righteous. And no amount of personal satisfaction could ever justify being such a soft, pathetic Mommy's boy he was leaving the entire galaxy to rot.

Eyes solemn, Rey rested her chin in her hand and cocked her head. "You know, I really don't get you. One moment you'll seem so normal and aware of when something's all messed up, but the next, everything you say is completely backwards."

He cleared his throat. Enough with the wandering thoughts and distractability. This was getting ridiculous. He was here to teach her. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Yeah, I figured that much," she sighed.

They lapsed into silence.

"Was that all you wanted to know today?" he asked eventually.

She bit her lip and nodded toward his partially deconstructed lightsaber hilt. "Can I?"

"Help yourself."

"Alright," she said, turning it over in her hands. "New hypothesis about the construction of this saber: you do know your stuff, somewhat."

He scowled.

"At the least," she amended, grinning and leaning forward on her elbows. "That being established, please tell me – what _is_ this? Why is this part open?"

She waved the hilt around in the air between them, but he wouldn't have noticed if she'd smacked him in the nose with it.

He was too captivated by her smile.

Had he ever seen her smile before? He couldn't think of – oh, no, he had. The day he semi-formally joined the Resistance. It had been quick and brief, then; over too soon. Because he'd made her stop.

She wasn't letting him stop her now. Her smile was as radiant as a cloudless sky. It lit up her face and wrinkled her nose and the corners of her eyes, and it took his breath away and made his heart clench in his chest.

_Look at her,_ he thought. _Just look at her._

"Don't tell me you forgot why you did that," she needled.

_Look at how happy she could be. And here you are making her miserable._

He swallowed thickly. "Ease of access. The crystal rattles around a lot inside. Sometimes I have to push it back into place."

She brightened, if possible, even further. "Then why don't you secure it better?"

"Because it would break loose and wreck the inside of the hilt, meaning I would have to take the whole thing apart every time."

"Well, your choice." Her mouth twisted wryly. "But _why_ is this wire on the outside?"

"Because it would get fried if I put it inside with the crystal."

"How is that an even remotely safe construction?!"

"It hasn't blown my hands off _yet_."

Her excitement was rapidly turning into morbid fascination. She subdued herself just enough not to sound like she was looking forward to it when she said: "It's only a matter of time, you know."

"I can live with that risk."

"Aren't you worried the wire'll come loose from –"

"It does that all the time," he said. "I just put it back when I'm done."

"But what if you tear it out completely and your saber stops working?"

He threw his hands up in the air. "Then I would be just as screwed as when the wire fries. Look, I'm working with what I have. I know the family knack for mechanics passed me by, but I'm not a _complete_ idiot."

"I think that's open for debate," Rey said dryly. "No, alright, I get it. Snoke wouldn't let you get a new crystal before, and now you don't _want_ one. But this construction is terrible and you should reconsider it as soon as possible. One of these days it's going to get you killed."

"Don't worry, Alderaanians throw great funerals. You'll love it."

She gasped. "Ben!"

_"I'm joking."_

"...that's your joking face?"

"Yes."

"I'll keep that in mind," she said, every word more skeptical than the last.

He rolled his eyes and leaned back in his chair. "It's not like I'm even going to be using it anytime soon."

"Right. I'm keeping it from you." She worried at the wire that offended her so badly with a blunt fingernail. "Would you mind if I tinkered with it a bit?"

"Weren't you just asking for my help to build your own saber?"

"For the non-mechanical parts. If you help me with that, I can help you with this."

That sounded like a solid plan. On the one hand, he agreed. On the other hand... that saber had been an extension of himself for almost half his life. The crystal may be the most important part, but he had made the hilt himself, and remade it countless times over the years. The long history of constant care gave it its own sentimental value.

That thought was almost enough to tell Rey to scrap it for parts and make a new one from scratch if she cared so much about his weaponry. But – perhaps sensing the thought – she spoke up before he could.

"I won't make any permanent changes without asking you first."

"If you think of _any_ changes to make, _I'll_ be the one to make them," he said.

She shrugged. "Works for me."

Bands of tension unwound from around his chest and shoulders. Breathing deeply, he nodded his assent and gratitude.

"I'll draw up calculations for the power output for... all our current crystals." He eyed the pieces sitting by her elbow. "Those seem to have split clean down the middle, which will make adjusting for the altered mass and disrupted structure easy. Though if you decide to get one of your own, I'll have to assess it before I can do the same. I'll show you how it works. There are also rituals that are traditionally performed during the construction of a saber, Force-procedures to elevate the whole beyond the sum of its parts, but that can wait until after –"

Rey looked cagey all of a sudden.

"What?" he asked.

"What makes you think I want a crystal of my own?" she asked. "I have two perfectly good ones right here, you said so yourself."

"It's your decision to make," he said as neutrally as he could manage.

That his grandfather's heirloom lightsaber consistently chose her over him was something he'd rather not dwell on at the moment. And besides, he'd prefer _not_ to snap at her to get her own and give him back what should have been his by right of blood and destiny. (_'You mean the destiny you accidentally-on-purpose cut yourself off from so your mommy would call you a good boy and give you a hug?'_ Snoke's voice in his head started sneering, and he squashed it flat like a bug.)

She nodded absently, biting her lip. "...so, I can make my lightsaber any color I want, right?"

Was _that_ it? Well, that was unexpected.

"I have a feeling this one is pretty attached to being blue," he said honestly.

"But I _could_ make one in any color, if I used the right crystal?" She looked like the question physically pained her.

"Yes."

"I was thinking of a different color," she admitted.

"Please tell me it's not green," he blurted out.

That seemed to shake her out of her guilty spiral.

"No. Not green," she said, giving him an odd look. "Why?"

Doing his utmost best to keep his face impassive, he shook his head. He shouldn't have said that. If she didn't make the connection herself, he was not going to make it for her. Luckily for him, though, she was still preoccupied with her own dilemma.

"Is that bad? To be thinking of a different crystal?"

"Why would it be bad?"

"I don't know, it seems... selfish, maybe? Wasteful, definitely." She picked up the blue crystals and rolled them around in her hand. "To discard these ones just because I want a different color? This saber called to me, and it came when I called. But now..."

"Perhaps it sought you out because it had one last job to do before being retired," he suggested softly. If he thought of it like that, it might even ease his own heartache.

"I'm not sure it did."

"Have you always felt this strongly about colors?"

"No. I have no idea where this is coming from."

"Then maybe it's the future nudging your subconscious through the Force."

"Maybe."

But she still didn't seem convinced.

"There's no rule against having more than one lightsaber, you know. They're powerful, but not invulnerable. It's still just a piece of machinery; it can malfunction, or be destroyed, or get knocked out of your hands and end up out of your reach. You could make a fresh start with a new saber of your own creation and keep this one as back-up."

"Hm." That, finally, seemed to hit a more positive note. "Maybe."

He laid his hand flat on the table between them to get her attention. She met his eyes.

"Take one piece of advice from me, though: don't try to force yourself to do anything that doesn't feel right."

She gave him a sad smile. "Yeah. Thanks, Ben."

**I-oOo-I**

"They're minerals and as such, by definition not alive. But they're so attuned to the Force they may as well be. Anyone can harvest and use them with the right technical support, but Force-sensitive creatures can resonate with them in a way that turns crystal and wielder into partners..."

He told her everything he knew about kyber crystals, spiritually, technically, and mineralogically; taught her how to calculate the energy output or evaluate it mentally; drew her examples of the many different shapes a lightsaber could take, from the straight and simple standard to curved handles, short broadblades, elegant curving and twisting shapes that pushed the boundaries of stable plasma containment fields, double-ended saberstaffs, spears and knives, ancient crossguards like his own...

Rey was attentive and inquisitive and picked things up like she'd been studying the subject matter for years. If she understood everything he had to teach her so intuitively, they would draw level with each other in no time.

The thought didn't displease him.

They parted civilly. He tried not to let that mean too much.

_Protect Mom._ That was the mission. 'Protect Rey'... well. He could only remind himself that she didn't need it.


	10. V - -struction (II)

Rey did not show him her finished work before she sortied. He had to remind himself that that was exactly what he had asked of her; for them to be civil and productive in their interactions without getting all sentimental and overinvested in each other. It took some head, meet wall and calling himself schoolyard-level names to come to his senses, but he managed it eventually.

Then it was time for one of his least favorite parts of officer training: standing around on the bridge – or in this case, sitting around in the communications pit – and listening silently as others carried out _his_ mission. That familiar mixture of boring and nerve-wracking, with the classic addition of having no control over what happened on the field, while what happened there might very well decide whether he and the people he was responsible for lived or died.

"Listen carefully and read the room," his mother told him, pointing out an unobtrusive spot for him to settle. "Let us handle this. Speak up if you think there's something we're overlooking, but not before."

He nodded and went where he was bid. One step at a time. The Resistance would only trust him if he gave them enough reasons to, and letting them use the information and advice he had contributed to this mission however they wanted would be the first reason.

It had been decided, when the Resistance last evacuated, that their new location would be kept from him. He'd plucked the information from the head of the simpleton who came up with that laser-brained idea even as the man had told it to him, but they hadn't needed to know that. Now, though, they booted up the galactic map and the location of the mountain base lit up in red for all to see; him included.

The Upsilon called in, confirmed that control had a read on its beacons, was cleared for departure, and disappeared from the map as it jumped to hyperspace. The Falcon, ditto. An endless four and a half hours passed, which no amount of telling himself that this was nothing, that if they hadn't fled into the Western Reaches he would have been sitting here all day, made any less of a chore.

One beacon came back to life. Then the other.

"Control, this is the Upsilon, do you copy," Poe's tinny voice came over the comms.

"This is control and we copy, Upsilon," his mother said.

"The Falcon and I have both reached the rendezvous point. No enemy signatures or hostile response detected."

"Roger that, Upsilon. You may proceed."

"Deploying probe droid now... and... she's on her way."

They waited another two hours for the droid on its tiny thrusters to navigate toward and through the gravity maze. He wished he had his mask. It would do nothing to conceal his body language, but at least when he wore it he could make all the faces he wanted without anybody noticing.

Or take a nap. A nap would be nice.

Poe kept up a sporadic stream of meaningless updates about the probe's readings. By the time there was anything worth listening to, he'd let his thoughts stray so far he barely noticed.

"– and one mid-sized freighter showing life signs, carrying machine components of some kind. They're disconnecting the fuel lines now. One good hit and it'll go up like a wad of powder-paper. Life-sign readings inside the station are minimal, as expected. So far, Ben's intel looks sound."

He raised his head and sat up straight.

"This looks good. I can do it. Permission to engage, General?"

"Permission granted," she said. She looked over her shoulder to smile at him. "Have at 'em, Poe."

Poe crowed. "Ellen, retreat to a safe distance. Look sharp, Falcon, I want you ready to move in on my mark."

The Falcon, unable to transmit without giving away its position to the First Order, made no verbal reply. But a visual code had been established beforehand, and Poe followed up moments later with, "Your acknowledgment is acknowledged, Falcon. Alright, here I go!"

And then, finally, _action_.

...or, more sitting and waiting, in his case. Now there was just a lot more to watch and listen to. The holo-map no longer showed much of the Western Reaches, but had narrowed its scope to the area surrounding the supply station. The red dot of the Upsilon could be seen winding and weaving its way through the dense cluster of gravity wells and spatial distortions that hid the station from sensors.

It occurred to him that, as thoroughly as the First Order had the area mapped out, the station's position was inherently unstable. The Resistance was going to blow it up today. But even if he hadn't given them these maps, even if they'd chosen a different target, sooner or later the cosmotopography would change and its safe haven in the eye of the storm would disappear. He had found the evacuation or relocation protocols for such an occurrence in the database. Everything was already in place for a safe, orderly retreat.

Today, though, the hostile red dot that was Poe moved further and more faintly through the blue-light lines on their pilfered map, until it disappeared completely from sensors, still multiple hair-pin turns away from the large rectangle representing the station. And that's when the _real_ nerves started.

Ordinarily, Poe's voice would have come over the comms – grunting, yelling, the occasional actual message. "Gotcha! The manned freighter is down, control. No survivors," he imagined. And, "The first of the station's turrets is down." "Two down." "Shit, shit, shit! No, I'm fine, I'm okay, just need to remember the size of this shuttle, I'm – _three down!_"

By the Force, he hated that part. But he hated this information blackout more.

He clasped his hands, jiggled his foot, and tried to think professional thoughts.

Luckily, Poe made quick work of the station's meager defenses, allowing BB-8 to slice into the communications relays and reestablish contact. Poe's voice burst back to life across the comms just as he blew out the windows of the control center to stop station command from self-destructing. Cheers rose up on both sides of the line.

There would be no safe, orderly retreat from this outpost.

Scanning for life-forms, Poe reported; BB-8 working its astromech magic; the Falcon springing into action.

In the Resistance's control center, he used the Force to read the room and the comms both, because superstition got the better of him and he didn't trust this to go well if he didn't keep a close eye on both ends of the operation. While long-distance Force activity had never been his strong suit, with Snoke as a teacher he had learned a great deal about it nonetheless. Rey and Chewie's minds were faint, though distracting through their mere presence. Poe's consciousness was loud and stifling with purpose. But as Poe spoke, he caught a glimpse of a fleeting observation of his, an impression of negligible satisfaction, quickly set aside for the knowledge that there were more where these had come from:

An image of bodies being sucked out into space. Familiar black uniforms and white armor. Smoke and fire and flashes of transparisteel splintering and flying every which way as laser fire struck and the bubble of air it had kept contained decompressed, bursting into the void and spilling itself and its contents into nothingness like so much debris. _Human_ debris. Faces he didn't know, but bearing minds he was intimately familiar with the meticulously sculpted shapes of, twisted grotesquely in their death throes.

His people. Dying.

He'd gotten plenty of his own troops killed in the past. The exploration missions had been death traps. Forming and leading the Knights of Ren had been a disaster from start to finish. He'd learned how expendable the lives he held in his hands were the hard way, by trying and failing to preserve them until he finally got it through his thick skull to prioritize the bigger picture. He had learned to live with this years ago.

And yet.

_Traitor. Murderer. Monster. _

_(There was a hole in – ) _

Dammit. _Dammit!_ Why couldn't anything ever be easy? Why did there always, always have to be _something_ that settled in his stomach like a stone and filled it with the dreadful certainty that his weakness and failure and inadequacy were a foregone conclusion, which he could only dispel through a destructive show of strength, or by fighting some tangible substitute for the unseen foes crowding him, or –

He closed his eyes and reached into the Force, across the bridge formed by the comms, into the heart of what was happening on that faraway battlefield. He took hold of the icy nothingness of their deaths and the fire of the violence surrounding them, and tightened his mind's grip until the physical reality of it split and crumbled and fell away, and only the Force remained.

He was stuck in the control room, listening and watching from countless lightyears away. He could do nothing – nothing useful, nothing worthy, nothing adequate – with the agonizing Dark power that burned his bones to char and electrified his veins. But one day, he told himself, head down and eyes squeezed shut as he fought to breathe through the pain, these deaths would have meaning. Serve a purpose. Prove themselves righteous.

_Stop whining and think of the bigger picture,_ he thought. _Think of Mom. You will not fail. You_ cannot _fail._

Burning the power up like this hurt as much as anything Snoke had ever done to him. Mom wouldn't approve. But taking their fates into himself was the only way he knew to do right by the men and women he had betrayed to stand by her side.

And the slaughter was only just getting started.

**I-oOo-I**

The plan he and Poe had concocted went off without a hitch. The supply station's personnel was subdued with no fatalities and only a few minor injuries on the part of the Resistance. There had been two freighters docked at the station; the one Poe blew up, crew and all, and a smaller one that – all the better for them – was disguised as a civilian vessel. It took the better part of the remaining day cycle and the next to move all the supplies to their own base. Their storage rooms were too small, but room was found or made in other parts of the bunker. They hauled over three TIE fighters at a time, two in the Falcon's tractor beam and one in the Upsilon's.

His – no, _the station's_ crew was executed, and the station sabotaged to maneuver itself into the destructive clutches of gravity over the course of the next several standard days. It would look like a fatal malfunction.

He spent the waking hours of the operation sitting still and silent in a corner of the control room, chewing on the reality of his treason.

To say he was unhappy with how it affected him was an understatement. For years he had been infamous for his disinterest in any operation that did not involve the Force. It wasn't an attitude he had purposely set out to cultivate, but it wasn't exactly something Snoke had discouraged either. Ignoring what Hux and the others were doing had made his life easier in much the same way learning to see the bigger picture had. To suddenly find himself feeling so wretched over betraying the faceless, nameless grunts and pawns of the First Order was like a slap to the face.

His mother was safer now than she had been before. That was all that ought to matter.

(At least it wasn't as bad as leaving Skywalker's temple in flames, half of all he had known for so long dead and ruined amidst the swaying grass. It just went to show, he thought, that practice made everything easier.)

"Excellent work today. Stings, doesn't it?"

Late into the first night, he looked up. Caluan Ematt, the tall, white-haired, white-bearded old Rebel who took bets on him with his mother, nodded at the comms console across the room and took the seat beside him.

"It stings, listening to your people getting cut down. Perhaps more than you thought it would."

_Your face is an open book, boy,_ he heard Snoke sneer over the chasm of a decade.

He pulled his face into a sneer of his own. "They're not my people anymore."

"But they were for a long time," Ematt said calmly. "Listen, son –"

"I'm not your son," he growled, throat tightening.

"It's a figure of speech."

"I don't care."

Ematt rolled his eyes. "Alright, listen, _you snot-nosed brat_. That better? After the war, I worked with a lot of defectors and surrendering commanders and Imperials who were released from custody. A lot of men and women who thought they'd been doing the right thing and either learned differently or simply had to come to terms with the fact that they'd lost. Only ever met a handful that _didn't_ care about keeping their troops or comrades safe deep down, under the layers of banthashit they'd been trained to spew about proudly laying down their lives for the Empire. It's just not in our nature. You can pretend you don't care about yours anymore all you want, but anyone looking at you can tell that's a lie."

"What's your point?"

"People like you?" Ematt said, elbow on knee and leaning in, pointing. "Backstabbers and turncoats? They don't get to take back their choices. You try to return to the First Order, they'll kill you. You try to leave the Resistance, we'll kill you. I love the General, she deserves to get everything she wants to get out of rehabilitating you even after everything you've done to her, but I'll be damned if I let you do anything like that to her _again_. So you're not one of those snake-eyed psychopaths who don't care about anything or anyone. Good for you. Good for your mother. Having a heart at all is the first step. Having it in the right place is the second. Not letting the weight in your heart crush you once it starts to sink in what you've done, though, that's an entirely different matter. The first time is always the hardest, so maybe next time you'll think back on how you're feeling right now and laugh. But I'll warn you right now: you'd better find a way to deal with this –" Ematt gestured around the room. "– or you won't last. You'll end up like all those ex-Imps I knew who gave up and ate their blasters."

He couldn't get a read on the man's feelings or intentions. Ematt was shielding his mind like it was second nature to him.

"You don't know the first thing about me," he said, low and dangerous.

Ematt looked supremely unimpressed. "You hear more stories in a war than anywhere else, but they're all the same deep down inside."

"_Or_ how long I'll last."

"Sure, brat, whatever you say. Listen..." Ematt sighed and leaned back in his chair, looking around the room and seeing the passage of generations more than anything else. "Unfortunately for you, you managed to kill almost the entire old guard before you defected. These kids, they've only ever known one side. They were either born after the Empire fell or they were too young while it stood to understand and remember it properly. And unlike the Empire, the First Order didn't grow from _within_ the Republic. You guys are a shadow creeping in from the edge of known space, not their friends and neighbors and cousins and parents, taking in all the same information but coming away with a completely different message. They've never been faced with a society that's been put through a shredder and tasked with piecing it back together. They were too young to understand the work it took, and they don't think they'll ever have to.

Right now, these kids think they're too good to give a high-ranking defector, or one with actual blood on his hands, the time of day. They don't think you or anyone else like you will see another day of freedom once this war is won, or that people like you will ever live alongside them. Hell, maybe for them life _will_ be that simple. Maybe, if we win, the First Order will crawl back into the hole it came from and never show its face again, or be wiped out to the last organic and droid, and they'll never have to find out that beating the enemy into submission is just the start, but having to live alongside them again lasts for the rest of your life. But it wasn't that easy for us, and it won't be for you."

Ematt pinned him with a look. He tried to push down any hint of a reaction that might be showing on his face.

This man he only knew from a yearly handshake was so sure he would live to see these fantasies play out. His mother was so sure he would live to see them play out. _Her_ self-delusion he could understand, but Ematt's was baffling.

His mother wanted him to make amends for his wrongdoings by fighting bravely, and then transition to a long and happy life of peace along with everybody else, retire to Vashka in his old age, and be visited by a flock of children and grandchildren until he passed peacefully in his sleep.

It wasn't going to happen. He blew any chance of that when he was only nineteen years old. The universe wouldn't let him.

He would die on his knees or he would die fighting, one or the other. Which one only a matter of what his mood happened to be like when the day came. Even if he made it out of the war alive, he would be executed soon after. And even if he managed to escape justice, the law or the underworld would catch up to him one day.

Leia Organa may have enough sway within this Resistance to keep her son alive and free for the foreseeable future, but there was a reason she spent her time mucking around trying to build a private militia nowadays rather than commanding authority within the legal government. In battle, she was a leader and a warrior still. In peacetime, she was nothing but Darth Vader's disgraced daughter, a fanatic living on the fringes of society.

To most of the galaxy, his mother was barely a shadow of the freedom fighter and senator she had once been. The war against the First Order – _if_ won – _could_ repair a great deal of the damage done by the revelation of her parentage years ago. But as soon as everyone put two and two together and realized that not only Leia Organa's father was of the Dark Side, but also her _son_, whatever good will she had left to bank on would evaporate.

Even the Resistance barely took her seriously where he was concerned. If she tried to present his 'miraculous return' to the rest of the galaxy, she would be ruined forever.

Caluan Ematt, however, obviously wouldn't hear a word of that.

"Your mother – well, being your mother, obviously she has other plans for you," the old man said. "Your mother being Leia Organa, she might even pull them off. And unlike your fellow snot-noses here, I know all about the kind of future she has in mind, and what it might take to get there. So maybe don't dismiss my advice out of hand, hm?"

"And what would that advice be?" he asked tonelessly.

"Starting with the situation at hand?" Ematt said, and barked out a sudden, startling laugh. "What I always do is picture the moment the Stormtrooper who shot at my old tooka for rubbing his ankles decided to become the kind of guy who tries to kill some random citizen's pet for doing what pets do. Works wonders to remind me that I made the right choice becoming who I am, and they didn't."

Ematt stood up and clapped him on the shoulder. He tensed from head to toe.

"You made the right choice by coming here. Nobody is obligated to _like_ you for it, but the Rebellion respects that. Better late than never, Ben. Just remember that. For Leia's sake _and_ your own."

And the old Rebel walked away.

"But my Stormtroopers didn't make that choice," he thought to himself out loud.

Ematt turned. "What?"

He met the man's eyes.

"These aren't your Empire-employed volunteers. First Order Stormtroopers are brainwashed children. Their entire lives are painstakingly arranged to ensure they can't even conceive of such choices. Regimented down to the minute, down to every ounce of muscle or fat on their bodies, down to the exact movements they use to wash themselves. They –"

He cut himself off. His heart was racing.

"Right. I keep forgetting." Ematt shook his head. There was a whiff of ancient-boned weariness in the Force, but only fleetingly. For it to slip past this man's defenses, though, it had to be a powerful sentiment indeed. "You'll have to learn to ignore that too, son. If you make it out on the other side, maybe you'll get to advocate for them. But that won't work if you drive yourself over the edge worrying about them now."

"So, 'stop caring so much and all your problems will go away'? You sound like a Jedi," he said.

Ematt shrugged. "If that's what it takes to retire, sanity intact, I wouldn't knock it."

But Ben Solo and Kylo Ren both had been knocking it for as long as he could remember. He expected better of himself than a Jedi's apathy, even if it hurt more.

After all, what had a little more pain ever been to him?


End file.
